USDA · Risk Management Agency cause of loss

Crop-loss bands by county — report

The Risk Management Agency publishes, under the Federal Crop Insurance Act, the cause of loss for every insured county and commodity in the United States: the premium paid, the indemnity paid, the liability insured, the quantity planted and lost, and the count of policies that filed a loss. That file is history, county by county and cause by cause, and the agency gives it away. What no source publishes is the county-crop's own band — the range its annual loss ratio has actually run, read against the causes that produced it. That band is the join, and it is what is sold here: one county and one commodity, drawn from the agency's whole filed record and published as a dated document on the day of purchase, every figure carrying the filing it came from.

• 18,794county-crops on the register

What you get

• A dated document for one county and one commodity, stating the county and the commodity on its cover
• The annual loss ratio the county-crop has filed, year by year, across every year the agency holds for it
• The band those years make: the low end, the middle and the high end of the observed record, and the worst year, named
• The causes of loss that carried the county-crop's indemnity, largest first, with each cause's own paid total
• Premium, indemnity, liability, quantity planted, quantity lost and policy counts, each as the agency files it
• The filing each figure came from, printed alongside that figure
• A format built for filing, citing and handing to a lender, an agent or a board

Who buys it

Farm operators and their agents deciding cover before a policy is signed, agricultural lenders pricing a loan against a county's filed experience, crop insurance agents, and cooperative and extension staff who need a county-crop's loss record on paper.

Questions

What is a loss band?

The band is the range of annual loss ratios a single county and commodity has actually filed with the Risk Management Agency, read at three points across those years — the low end, the middle and the high end — with the worst year named beside them. It is taken from observed years only: the band points are years the county-crop really ran, never a figure interpolated between two of them.

How is the band different from the agency's own cause of loss tool?

The agency publishes the history, and its tool will show you that history for a county and a commodity, cause by cause. The band is the step the agency does not take: it re-projects the county's whole filed record onto the single county-crop the reader farms, so the annual loss ratio is stated as a distribution with a low end, a middle and a high end, and the causes are ordered by the indemnity they actually paid. The history is free and stays free. The band is the join.

Which years does the report cover?

Every year the agency holds for that county and commodity, stated on the cover as the span from the first filed year to the last. A partial year is carried and its last year says so.

How is the report dated?

The report is built from the agency's published file as it stands on the day it is bought. The cover page states that date, and every figure in the document carries the filing it came from, so the record can be filed, cited and handed to a lender, an agent or a board.

Does the report tell me what my own claim will be?

No, and any document that claimed it would be lying. The band is an inference from what the county and the commodity have filed, not a measurement of your fields. It is the record your county-crop has actually run, which is what an operator wants before a policy is signed rather than after a claim.