Public comments are now being accepted through Jan. 27 on a final rule designed to expand producer access to crop insurance and other risk protections. USDA Risk Management Agency Administrator Pat Swanson says the focus of the Expanding Access to Risk Protection Final Rule (ERP) is “how to reduce burdensome regulations and burdensome paperwork for our farmers, just to help make the program more accessible for our farmers and easier for our agents to deliver the programs.”
Among those aspects of the ERP schedule to take effect beginning with the 2026 crop year is improved land access through prevented planting relief.
“In our current regulation, we had it in there that there were three requirements in order for this physical piece of land to be considered and qualified to receive the prevented planting payment — that it had to be planted, harvested and insured. And what we were finding was that the insured piece was really difficult to find the answer, and so it was becoming really burdensome for our farmers. So we decided just to remove that word from the rule. So now farmers just have to prove that the land had been planted and harvested once in the last four years.”
Another change is streamlined production reporting to crop insurance agents.
“We still want to do the same-year production reporting, but if the farmer is moving to a different insurance provider, it’s not required now for them to go back to their previous agent to make that production report.”
The rule also includes simplification of dispute resolution processes and adjustments to policy dates, such as end-of-insurance and policy provisions, to create greater flexibility at the county level.
“All the dates that are involved — like termination dates, cancellation dates and end-of-insurance dates — we’re just removing those from the federal regulations so that they’re more nimble, so we can make changes as we see necessary without having to make this into a final rule. And it just makes it more nimble for the program to be able to see, ‘Oh, there’s an issue here with maybe the termination date,’ which creates a billing date or a time when a farmer has to pay by.”
More details about the Expanding Access to Risk Protection Final Rule are available online at www.rma.usda.gov or through your local crop insurance agent.