Crop Insurance Today Second Quarter 2020 - 39

ty damage, such as this, can be excluded from
the Actual Production History (APH) database
beginning with the 2018 crop year, and retroactively for 2017. However, the burden of verifying damage, determining loss, modifying
acreage reports, and documenting damage on
production reports still rests with the Approved
Insurance Providers (AIPs) and requires significant effort.
Fortunately, it appears that local restrictions,
research, and training had an impact in 2019
as most states saw a decrease in complaints.
Illinois, though, still had more than 700 complaints, which was more than twice the number
in 2018 and almost three times as many as 2017.
What was happening in Illinois that wasn't happening in other states? Late plantings due to
wet weather and an extension of the application cut-off date to July 15 may have played a
role, but data indicates that hotter than average
weather in June resulted in greater volatilization and drift.
It will be interesting to see what 2020 brings.
As mentioned, most states saw a decline in
complaints last year. Was this due to fewer
planted acres resulting from wetter weather? The experience in Illinois suggests no, but
we will likely never know. Several states have

greatly increased fines related to applicator negligence. This should promote applicator situational awareness as the old fines amounted to a
wrist slap, but in some states now run into the
tens of thousands of dollars.
The crop insurance industry has devoted
time and effort dealing with a problematic uninsurable cause of loss. However, these
cropping system technologies offer a needed
tool for farmers. In places where weed resistance to other herbicides is rampant, uncontrollable weeds often infest fields year after
year. Under those circumstances, Good Farming Practices implementation could be questioned. Further, yield loss from unseen weed
competition has likely been indemnified in the
past so it can be surmised that these technologies, although burdensome for AIPs, could
reduce indemnities.
The year 2020 could prove pivotal to agriculture. Registration of recently released dicamba
herbicide formulations automatically expire in
December. And, in a hearing on April 21, two of
a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals blistered the EPA and Monsanto
(now Bayer Crop Science) for a lack of evidence
to support extending registration of the new
dicamba formulations in 2018. The big question

is how the EPA will treat the re-registration and
whether the courts will intervene. Irrespective,
I think 2020 will be a critical year for these companies and farmers to get this right. Dicamba
and 2,4-D tolerant crop acreage is rising exponentially and will soon reach adoption rates of
80 percent or more of cotton and soybean acres.
With that many acres, something needs to be
right or a lot more time and effort will be spent
on this uninsurable cause of loss.
It is also worth mentioning that researchers
are currently studying, what they are calling,
dicamba "failures" in some fields in 2019. In
Tennessee, some Palmer amaranth populations
are not controlled in the dicamba cropping systems, and waterhemp is showing signs of resistance in a few fields in Illinois and Indiana.
Although not officially called resistance, these
are troubling signs for these herbicide technologies and suggest that their effectiveness may be
short-lived-at least in some places.
If the new herbicides are not re-registered,
or if weed resistance becomes commonplace
with these herbicides, agriculture may find itself back to where we were in 2016. If so, will
these technologies prove too burdensome to be
continued? The answer to these questions will
come soon enough.

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Crop Insurance Today Second Quarter 2020

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