Federal crop insurance programs should not be used as a vehicle to force farmers to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices.
That was the recommendation of ag insurance experts — and echoed by some lawmakers — during a July 20 House Ag Subcommittee hearing about Title 11 of the 2023 farm bill.
“Don’t try to mix policy objectives like climate into crop insurance,” said Kathy Fowler, who testified on behalf of the Crop Insurance Professionals Association. “Crop insurance is meant to protect the farmers’ profitability. When profitable, good conservation will follow.”
The discussion on Capitol Hill came the same day President Joe Biden called climate change “a clear and present danger” and “an existential threat to our nation and the world.”
“Let me be clear, climate change is an emergency,” Biden said. “And in the coming weeks, I’m going to use the power I have as president to turn these words into formal, official government action through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders and regulatory powers of the presidency.”
Other environmental and ag groups, meanwhile, have proposed tying insurance rates and premium discounts to conservation and climate-smart ag practices.
Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa.., the ag committee’s ranking member, alluded to that strategy as a “push by some to hijack crop insurance programs to carry out a half-baked environmental experiment.”
“We don’t need to cherry-pick certain practices that might only work in specific regions of the country and use crop insurance to try to force all farmers into adopting the practice,” Thompson said. “We don’t need to use crop insurance as a carrot or worse, as a stick.”
U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, R-Il, agreed, adding she’s “concerned about the danger of using crop insurance rates as a tool to change farmers’ behavior” and “incentivizing certain practices that as of yet have unproven yield benefits.”
Bob Haney, CEO of AgriSompo, said any climate initiative should be funded separate from crop insurance and that any intersections between the two should “be incentivized and not place additional mandates on our farms and ranches.”
Thompson and other committee members further pushed back against a report released Tuesday by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition concluding that caps on subsidy premium discounts would save billions over the next 10 years.
Farmers with insurance policies can receive a nearly 60 percent discount on their plans, and in 2021 those discounts totaled $8.6 billion, according to the Risk Management Agency (RMA).
RMA data also shows 2.2 million policies were sold in 2021, covering more than 300 million acres with a total liability of $136.6 billion.
Fowler said the proposed caps and cutting premium cost shares are an “absolute non-starter” that would hurt small famers by “raising their premiums and removing the good risk from the risk pool.”
Fowler and Haney also said that while farmers benefitted from the various ad hoc disaster payments funded since the 2018 farm bill, lawmakers should avoid establishing a permanent disaster program in the 2023 legislation.
“(Private insurers) actually don’t want to see the creation of a program that would double-pay farmers for the same loss,” Haney said.
“This would indirectly discourage the purchase of crop insurance and possibly lead to changes in farming practices that could lead to potential instances of fraud, waste and abuse.”