Helping You In Evaluating Crop Hail Insurance Needs
Hail is the one catastrophe that is most likely to totally destroy a part of your crop and leave the rest looking fine. The part of the crop that hail takes out may well be less than the deductible of your Multiple Peril Crop Insurance policy. It may also not lower your yield enough for a revenue insurance policy to kick in.
Crop-Hail Insurance Fills The Gap
While Multiple Peril Crop Insurance policies protect you against losses severe enough to significantly drop the yield per insured unit, Crop-Hail Insurance gives you acre-by-acre protection. This protection can be up to the actual cash value of the crop. If you buy 65/100 (65 percent of yield and 100 percent of price) or greater for your MPCI, you can, under many policies, delete the hail coverage and replace it with private hail coverage. Many operators find it more effective to leave MPCI hail coverage in place and get a companion Crop-Hail policy to cover their MPCI deductible.
Evaluating Crop Hail Insurance is especially important to those with group policies which leave individuals exposed to spot losses due to hail. You can also buy additional Crop Hail Insurance coverage during the growing season (prior to damage) to protect added profit potential from bumper crop yields or higher-than-normal crop values.
Even if your frequency of hail damage is low, remember that Crop-Hail coverage is rated for your area. The premiums may be much smaller than you think. And, unlike Multiple Peril Crop Insurance, Crop Hail Insurance can be purchased at any time during the growing season. It is an inexpensive way to protect against hail damage.
Crop Hail Insurance Overview
In short Crop Hail Insurance:
- is a Private Coverage and not part of the Federal Program.
- is usually an acre-by-acre coverage
- does not require production reports
- liability is expressed in a dollar amount, not a production guarantee.
- the dollar amount insured per acre may not exceed the cash value of the crop
- many plans allow coverage of specific acres within a county
- coverage is rated for individual areas
- losses are paid damage by the specified peril occurs to the crop
Adding Crop Hail Insurance to your Multiple Peril Insurance Coverage plan makes good financial sense with today’s very unpredictable patterns. Â