The U.S. Department of Agriculture partially reimburses farmers who lose cattle in natural disasters, or who can't plant crops because of bad weather, and even helps them remove debris left in fields after floods, but the USDA doesn't have a mechanism to pay farmers for crops in storage that have been damaged, and has never seen such a problem on this scale, according to U.S. Agriculture Under Secretary Bill Northey, Polansek reports.
"That’s in part because U.S. farmers have never stored so much of their harvests, after years of oversupplied markets, low prices and the latest blow of lost sales from the U.S. trade war with China - previously their biggest buyer of soybean exports," Polansek reports. Most of the stored crops are uninsured, so crop insurance won't cover it either.
U.S. farmers across the country had more than 2.7 billion bushels of soybeans stored as of March 1, which the USDA said was a record for that time period, and corn stocks were the third-largest on record, Polansek reports.
More than 1 million acres of farmland in nine major grain-producing states were damaged in the flood, P.J. Huffstetter and Humeyra Pamuk report for Reuters.
"Indigo Ag, an agriculture technology company, identified 832 on-farm storage bins within flooded Midwest areas," Polansek reports. "They hold an estimated 5 million to 10 million bushels of corn and soybeans - worth between $17.3 million to $34.6 million - that could have been damaged in the floods." Since there is no mechanism for compensating farmers with ruined stores, Northey said Congress would have to pass legislation to make it happen.
Right now, farmers are worried about being able to remove the flooding debris in time to plant corn. "To be fully covered by crop insurance, Iowa farmers must plant corn by May 31 and soybeans by June 15, as yields decline dramatically when planted any later. Deadlines vary state by state," Huffstetter and Pamuk report.
No comments:
Post a Comment