Crop Insurance Today First Quarter 2020 - 5

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Decade in Review
By NCIS Staff

Introduction
The dawn of a New Year and a New Decade
is a time to pause and reflect on the trials that
tested us and the triumphs that brought new
opportunities. The past decade has been instrumental for the continued success of crop insurance programs. There have been policy challenges, weather disasters, market fluctuations,
and many other obstacles for the industry to
maneuver. But through it all, crop insurance has
proven to be an indispensable component of the
farm safety net. So, with the New Year and New
Decade we thought it would be worthwhile to
look back at some of the definitive moments
over the past 10 years that have strengthened
crop insurance.
Because a decade seems like almost 10 years,
we attempted to focus on what we believed to be
the highlights in terms of the Crop-Hail business
-including our friends from Canada, Federal
Crop Insurance, and finishing with a quick review of happenings at NCIS.
It is our hope that you will find this decade recap useful and a reminder of the importance and
value of having a strong, affordable, and available crop insurance safety net for U.S. farmers
and ranchers.

Developments in
Crop-Hail Insurance
NCIS Research and Loss
Procedures

The research program at NCIS has evaluated a wide variety of crops with different types
of damage over the past 100 years. Corn has
been the subject of industry research since
1928 but some of the most impactful research

was initiated at the end of the 2000's and completed early this past decade. The focus of this
research dealt with the loss of stand at the various growth stages. Original corn stand reduction
tables used various factors for loss of stands from
the 7-leaf stage up to the 10-leaf stage. The most recent research was conducted in six different states
for a minimum of three years at alternate locations
to determine losses from stand reduction at the
7-leaf stage and going up to the 17-leaf stage.
The results of this field research led to the
introduction of new loss adjustment
charts factoring up to the 17-leaf
stage. These results were incorporated into the Crop
Hail Loss Adjustment
Handbooks as well
as the MPCI Loss
Adjust Standards
Handbooks for
the 2014 Crop
Year.
Re vision
of the maturity line
weight factors for corn
is the culmination
of
eight years of
research in seven states across 12
locations resulting
in 24 site-years of data.
Maturity line factors are
used when the farmer decides to use corn insured as grain
for silage. The factors are used by the
adjuster to estimate mature production po-

tential based on the current level of crop maturity in the field. The research was initiated in 2009
and concluded in 2018. In comparison to previous maturity line factors, the research definitively
validated what many field adjusters had suspected-that the existing factors were out of date. The
new factors will be effective beginning with the
2020 crop year.

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Crop Insurance Today First Quarter 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crop Insurance Today First Quarter 2020