What Determines Peanut Crop Insurance Projected and Harvested Prices During the Price Discovery Period?

Mar 10, 2026

By Yangxuan Liu

For peanut farmers, understanding how crop insurance projected and harvested prices are determined is essential for purchasing crop insurance with confidence. The projected price determined in early spring guides how much crop insurance coverage a peanut grower can expect. Later in the season, the harvest price determines whether an indemnity payment is triggered if market conditions fall short.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA) sets the peanut crop insurance projected and harvest prices using the Peanut Formula Price (PFP). Because peanuts do not have an active futures market, their crop insurance projected and harvested prices are based on the futures prices of related commodities of wheat, cotton, soybean oil, and soybean meal. The market behavior of these commodities has historically correlated with peanut prices.

The PFP is calculated from the December futures contracts of these four commodities traded during the peanut crop insurance price discovery period within the insurance year. USDA also establishes a loan rate for in-shell peanuts, which serves as a price floor for both projected and harvest prices used in crop insurance. If the calculated PFP falls below this loan rate, the loan rate becomes the effective minimum, ensuring that coverage does not drop below a guaranteed level, even during a market downturn.

Factors that determine PFP are announced annually by the USDA and vary by production year and by sales closing date. For peanut crop insurance, the sales closing dates include January 31, February 28, and March 15 (Kalli, Liu & Biram, 2025). For the 2026 crop year, the following links take you to the RMA technical pages with current peanut factor values: January 31, 2026, February 28, 2026, and March 15, 2026.

Click here to see more...

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators