Changes coming to Sask. crop insurance program

Mar 06, 2024

Many producers in Saskatchewan won’t have to pay as much for crop insurance this year.

The province and federal government have announced changes to the crop insurance program which includes the average price per acre dropping from $446 to $389.

This means the average premium, which is the amount paid to keep a policy active, will decrease to $12.71.

Jeff Morrow, the president and CEO of the Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation, told farmnewsNOW crop prices are why the averages are dropping.

“The (crop) prices have softened so much that it’s still a lower average premium per acre.”

It’s not out of the question that prices are rising for many producers due to insurance claims. Over the last three years, more than $6 billion has been handed out.

One of the other major changes will benefit livestock producers. Feed crops like forage, greenfeed, and silage will now be covered. Morrow explained the lack of coverage was one of the bigger issues brought up by producers.

“Our livestock producers, in particular, have been dealing with successive years of drought, so they were certainly looking for improved tools to use for their risk management,” he said.

Other changes can be found on the Government of Saskatchewan’s website.

Producers have until March 31, 2024, to apply, reinstate, or cancel their Crop Insurance contract.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids