Crop insurance is a significant but necessary expense for farmers. A program from the Delaware Department of Agriculture, with $2 million in funding from the USDA aims to help farmers afford that coverage.
“This program will help reduce the cost by 30%, as long as a producer had a crop insurance premium in 2024 and they're signing up in 2025 for a plan," said Stacey Hofmann with the state Department of Agriculture.
The goal is to encourage farmers to augment their insurance coverage to help make sure they can stay in business, even when disaster strikes.
“By assisting them to increase the level of insurance that they have, so that they can continue to farm for generations to come," Hofmann said. "We don't want a farmer to have such a loss that they have to sell out to cover their expenses.”
She notes while many people think of crop insurance as just covering the crops in the field, it can also cover the whole farm, including livestock.
In the 2024 crop year, which ends on March 15, Delaware farmers received about $9 million in crop insurance payouts.
