The Agriculture Department’s Risk Management Agency this week announced it will make several changes to federal crop insurance prevented planting coverage.

RMA will implement these changes for most spring crops with prevented planting coverage, starting in the 2021 crop year, and for all crops with prevented planting coverage, starting in the 2022 crop year, the agency said.

“After unprecedented prevented planting in 2019, I thought it was incredibly important to examine how prevented planting policy can be improved,” said RMA Administrator Martin Barbre.

“Over the past few months, RMA has engaged producer groups, insurance agents, and Approved Insurance Providers in discussion through a prevented planting taskforce with the goal to improve prevented planting for producers when they really need it, but not to incentivize it.”

The changes include:

▪ Expand the “1 in 4” requirement nationwide. Currently, only producers in the Prairie Pothole National Priority Area are subject to the requirement, which requires producers to plant acreage in at least one of the four most recent crop years to be eligible for prevented planting coverage on those acres.

▪ Ensure that producers’ prevented planting payments adequately reflect the crops they intended to plant.

▪ Allow acreage planted with an uninsured second crop following the failure of a first crop within the same crop year to, nonetheless, be included as prevented planting eligible acreage.

▪ Allow prevented planting of a different crop than the producer attempted to plant when a producer does not have a history of producing two crops in the same field. if the producer can prove intention.

▪ Allow the use of an intended acreage report for the first two years, instead of only the first year, for producers in a new county where they have never produced the crop.