WASHINGTON, Oct. 14, 2015 - With combines rolling across
the country, yield monitors routinely share the “good news” of bumper crops and
the not so good news of wet or drought-parched regions where little seemed to
grow. All of this data, of course, can be used by USDA to establish the Actual
Production History (APH) that farmers and insurance providers annually use to
establish yields for crop insurance coverage.
But in addition to production history, the use of
permanent land descriptors could also allow linkage to land attributes, like
soil typology and hydrology within specific parcels of land – where yields
might be consistently higher or lower than other parts of the county. As a
result, the actuarial efficiency of the insurance offer to the producer could
be improved, noted USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) in a 2011 Manager’s
bulletin seeking comments on the possibility of APH enhancements.
Of course, the agency is prohibited from identifying
individual farmers in this project and from releasing any data to others, but
four years into the research, some interesting correlations are showing up.
“For the first time within the last few years, we
are collecting yield data at a land unit level,” explained RMA’s Tom Worth
during a recent crop insurance workshop in Louisville. He showed a map of
Grundy County, Iowa, for example, and the variations in yield based on
different soil types within the county.
“Previously, we just knew the county but not
necessarily the exact location of the field within the county. For the first
time, we have this geographically-specific information and we are now exploring
how the information can be related to other data, such as soils, where there
are extensive data sets.
Worth says any type of final result is still “a
long way off” as his agency conducts basis research, looking at how different
data sources can be matched up and how reliable the results can be.
“Once we establish that, then we can start asking:
What can that mean in terms of improving the yields and premium rates in the crop
insurance program,” he adds.
#30
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