EAST PEORIA, Ill. – With the March 15 deadline for many crop insurance options around the corner, an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois offered farmers attending the 2024 Illinois Farm Economics Summit (IFES) a glimpse at alternative agricultural insurance products available for the coming crop season.

Included in Brittney Goodrich’s presentation was perspective and advice about federal crop insurance options like Pasture, Rangeland and Forage (PRF) rainfall index insurance and Whole Farm Revenue (WFR) Protection.

“These are all federally subsidized products from the USDA that are available through your crop insurance agent,” said Goodrich, a rural Iowa native whose research interests include Risk and Uncertainty, Agricultural Contracts and Agricultural Policy. “You (also) have Livestock Risk Protection available for hogs and feeder cattle that is more on the price-insurance side of things. There is also a similar PRF product, (the) Apiculture Insurance (Program, or APR), for beekeepers.”

As for PRF, “the idea behind this insurance product is that it is going to insure livestock and hay producers against drought-like conditions that impact either your pasture production or your hay fields,” Goodrich said. “You are going to get a payment when rainfall is lower than the historical average. This is going to cover perennial pastureland and there is an annual product as well, though it is not yet available in Illinois. Hopefully, it will be soon.”

Holding PRF insurance will not exclude livestock and hay producers from receiving federal disaster payments under the Livestock Forage Disaster Program or other emergency payment programs that compensate producers for catastrophic drought, according to Goodrich. 

“If you have not a catastrophic drought but below average rainfall that will affect your forage production and might increase your input costs or cause you to sell off feeder cattle earlier, this is a great buy-up insurance coverage option for you,” she said, adding that only around 6 percent of Illinois forage and pastureland was enrolled in PRF in 2024. “There is room for expansion in Illinois for this product.”

Goodrich explained to the 95 or so producers present for the IFES that PRF insurance pays out based on measured precipitation within roughly 13-by-17-mile grids established throughout Illinois. The weather data is provided by the closest National Weather Service-NOAA weather station.

Moving on, Goodrich noted that WFR Protection, which was first introduced in 2015, is an option for all producers but is particularly good for diversified and specialty crop producers. The option allows producers to insure all the revenue and commodities associated with their farm under a single policy.

“You can insure up to $17 million in revenue, so it’s pretty flexible. It is a typical revenue product that is going to insure against anything from yield decreases due to weather or declines in market prices,” Goodrich said. “You can insure all your market commodities that are on your farm including livestock and specialty crops, and you can even insure commodities that are purchased for retail as well. Your covered revenue is based on your five most recent tax forms, or you can submit a farm plan to determine the amount of revenue that can be insured for a given year.”

WFR can be purchased along with more traditional revenue protection policies for corn and soybeans, however the indemnities from those policies would count toward WFR revenue, Goodrich cautioned.

WFR policies in Illinois averaged around $1.2 million in revenue in 2024, while the national average was slightly higher. The most popular overage level is 75 percent both in Illinois and the U.S. WFR’s “downfall,” according to Goodrich, lies in its complexity.

“You have to turn in all of your tax forms,” she said. “A streamlined product for small producers was released in 2022 called Micro Farm where you can insure up to $350,000 in revenue, and there is less paperwork involved – so there is another option.”

The current Whole Farm insurance unit differs from Multi-Crop Insurance (MCI) in that Whole Farm must contain all insurable acres of all insurance crops, according to the farmdoc team, while MCI could be any combination of insurable crops.

A farmdocDAILY article authored by Goodrich, “Important PRF-RI Insurance Decisions: Which Months to Insure?” (farmdoc daily (14):204, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nov. 8, 2024) can be accessed at www.farmdocdaily.illinois.edu.