Crop Insurance Tools
The 2024 iFarm Crop insurance Premium Calculator allows users to develop highly customized estimates of their crop insurance premiums, and compare revenue and yield guarantees across all available crop insurance products and elections for their actual farm case.
The Crop Insurance Evaluator tool provides helpful information to producers comparing costs and risk reductions across their available crop insurance alternatives.
This program calculates premiums, evaluates insurance payments, and provides historical data useful when making crop insurance decisions for multiple crops. Estimates are for crops in midwest and southeast states. Learn more on the farmdoc Daily crop insurance archive.…
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This program calculates crop insurance historical use and performance back to 1996. …
The cover crop project seeks to provide farmers with a practical web-based decision support tool designed to help manage cover crops in their fields. The project makes use of existing research to demonstrate the potential for cover crops, as well as providing useful information for decision making and management of this practice. It will also seek to apply future research on cover crops as results are incorporated into updates and new iterations of the tool. This remains a work in progress with a goal towards adapting with the science.
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Revisiting the Basis Risk when evaluating SCO and ECO
Higher subsidy rates for SCO and ECO in 2026 increase the attractiveness of their usage and the potential for replacing some RP coverage with county-level coverage. However, switching from farm-level to county-based coverage introduces basis risk because farm losses do not precisely mimic county losses. In regions where the basis risk is low, such as in Illinois, use of SCO and ECO with lower RP coverage levels can provide improved risk benefits at similar or lower premium cost to the farmer.
Comparing Crop Insurance Scenarios with SCO and ECO for 2026
Significantly reduced farmer-paid premiums for Supplemental and Enhanced Coverage Option (SCO and ECO) policies suggest that farmers should consider using these products in their 2026 crop insurance portfolios. Adding SCO and ECO to higher coverage level farm-level plans such as Revenue Protection (RP) will increase expect returns and reduce risk, while also increasing total premium costs. Expected returns can be increased more by reducing RP’s coverage level while still using ECO and SCO.
Release of Insurance Evaluator with the New SCO and ECO
We have recently released a new Insurance Evaluator on the farmdoc website. The revised tool takes into account recent increases in pre-mium support for the Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) and the Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO), as well as increases in support for the COMBO product. As a result of these premium support changes, many farmers may consider taking ECO and SCO and potentially lowering RP coverage levels, particularly for soybeans in the central part of Illinois.
The farmdoc Crop Insurance section offers iFARM online tools including the Premium Calculator, Payment Evaluator and Price Distribution Tool. These tools are updated annually during the Spring crop insurance election period.