Organic Specialty Crop Growers Gain New Insurance Flexibility

For producers of organic cranberries and stone fruit, like peaches and plums, USDA is expanding crop insurance flexibility beginning with the 2027 crop year. The change allows growers more flexibility to better match their risk management needs. USDA Farm Production and Conservation Undersecretary Richard Fordyce said it's part of a broader effort to improve crop insurance options for specialty crop farmers.

“From the inception of crop insurance, and I was kind of around at the beginning of crop insurance, and the focus was on Title 1 crops," said Fordyce. "It was on row crops and the iteration of those products and the different coverages and actually making that safety net more of a valuable option, a management decision that farmers were making that that progression happened over a long period of time. And we still continue to evolve crop insurance products. Specialty crops, you know, their journey has been a bit short. The products that have been available for specialty crops certainly don't have as long a history as some of the some of the products for row crops.”

Fordyce said the update may affect a relatively small number of acres, but it reflects a larger effort by USDA to strengthen crop insurance tools for all types of producers.

"If you can do enterprise units, optional units, as you mentioned, optional units give you more flexibility and better coverage if you have an isolated weather event that impacts yield," Fordyce said. "It is just the process that we go through to try to serve all farmers in a more meaningful way, to give them options from a risk management standpoint. The number of acres that this covers is probably not super large, but this is an example of the Risk Management Agency looking for options and looking for ways to better support farmers across all kinds of production systems."

The agency's focus on specialty crops comes as more farms diversify their operations and consumer demand changes.

“From my travels, what I'm seeing is that there's just more diversification on farms," Fordyce continued. "There may be a farm in Iowa that historically was growing Title 1 crops, so corn, soybeans, maybe some wheat into that rotation that are diversifying, whether they're bringing on a new family member into the operation or they just feel that there needs to be additional diversification. And I also believe from a consumer standpoint, would you rather buy sweet corn that came from the farm just down the road or buy sweet corn that came off a truck that's been on the road all night? Right? And so consumer preference, I think farm diversity, which has resulted in more specialty crops in more geographies.”

Jamaican cherries — Photo by Henk van der Steege on Unsplash

Fordyce said USDA is also looking for opportunities to expand specialty crop coverage as production spreads into new regions of the country.

“Let's say we have a product for blueberries in Michigan," he said. "Let's just I'm going to use that as an example. Well, we may be growing blueberries. I'll pick on Iowa again. We may be growing blueberries in Iowa, but we haven't been doing it for a great long time. And we can actually expand coverages as we start to see production in other parts of the country because the product has already developed. We just need to be able to expand the coverages. That's a good example of some improvements to specialty crop insurance coverage is expanding those areas and then creating coverages, creating products for additional specialty crops.”