Graphic: Insurance Spending Gap Between Corn and Other Crops at Widest Ever in 2023

Jun 27, 2024

By Mitchell Lierman

Impacted by drought and export disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine, insurance spending for corn versus that for other crops in 2023 grew to its widest-ever gap.

Increases in annual total corn premiums outpaced other highly-insured crops over the past five years. These policy premiums are paid for, in part, by government subsidies, which on average covered 62% of the crop insurance costs for farmers in 2022, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Deadlines to purchase spring-planted crop insurance were one month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an open-source project for visualizing world economic data, Ukraine was responsible for 9.3% of global corn exports in 2021.

Corn insurance spending fell in 2023, yet remained near record high

Insurance spending for several crops reached all-time highs in 2022, with earned premiums for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and sorghum doubling from pre-pandemic levels. Spending on the three most insured crops last doubled between 2006 and 2008.

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Video: Learning to Wrench From Dad the Hard Way

Harvest is a week out and the farm picked this week to fall apart. The truck needs a battery, the barn curtain's got a problem, and the corn and beans are telling us we're out of time to get it all fixed.

So it's a full day of wrenching. Tork supervises while I get the truck back running, then we're out at the hog barn where one rusted up part has the whole curtain system hung up. Ladder work, cable work, and a little dad-and-son disagreement about the right way to do it. We close it out walking the fields, shelling beans and checking corn, because whether everything's fixed or not, harvest starts when harvest starts.

Chapters: 00:00 Everything breaks the week before harvest 01:00 Tork supervises while I fix the truck 12:30 Out to the barn to find the curtain problem 14:30 One rusty part hung up the whole curtain 20:00 Running the curtain cable from the ladder 24:00 Walking the beans and corn before harvest 26:30 Wrapping up

We're a 6th generation family farm in southeast Iowa showing the real ups and downs of pig farming and row crop farming. No script, just the work. Subscribe and follow along.

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