“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
-William Jennings Bryan
“We’ve had 5 inches of rain. We should’ve had 10 on our farm by this point of the year. It would be considered a moderate drought for us. We were lucky enough to have a high water table in spring and the reserve water in our land hasn’t dropped that much. But you need some rain on the topsoil to get started and we were lucky to get that. 2017 was dry, 18 and 19 were fairly normal. Last fall was wet. Everybody I knew had 10 inches between August 10th and November 1st. Starting regenerative soil practices can help because if through such practices we can get plants to help to bank water underground we can mitigate some of the damage from dry and wet weather.”
-Glen Phillbrick
High Cost Weather Events
In the past and even today weather relief is tough to address on a federal level because it happens in many different forms. Some storms are localized affecting a single community or county, others are large enough to affect multiple states. Insurance wasn’t always the solution because high premium costs for crop insurance were inaccessible for years. In severe cases congress would just allocate relief money for the state so there was less incentive to purchase it. Because of poor coverage and small pools of insurance, farm relief for weather resulted in a series of inefficient, expensive, hazard relief bills to compensate farmers for crop failure due to weather. In 2018 Congress finally agreed to subsidize cheap affordable crop insurance in the 2018 Farm Bill as a way to avoid passing multiple relief acts. While not perfect, it gave farmers access to a safety net that wasn’t available to them before. This seemed like a workable solution at the time, but several major weather events that would hit North Dakota and the rest of the nation farmers proved that access to insurance alone was not enough to solve the problem.
“You could say that the government’s response to bad weather was the crop insurance program from the 2018 Farm Bill. The 2018 Farm Bill crop insurance program was created to replace disaster programs. Through the program the government will subsidize 60% of your insurance premiums to ensure that all farmers have access to affordable crop insurance. The goal was to have crop insurance replace ad hoc disaster payments programs that were so prevalent back twenty years ago and hopefully save some money and pain of crafting a new disaster relief bill every year.”
-Todd Leake
WHIP and WHIP+: Help is on the way?
Crop insurance is designed to deal with sporadic events or random major losses of crops. The model is set up so that it can deal with a few farms having major disasters while the other farmers pay premiums to reduce risk. Like any other insurance if everybody makes a claim at the same time it will break the system. When there is a widespread disaster like a hurricane, crop insurance premiums don’t have enough money to cover the cost. This is why the Wind Hurricane Indemnity Program (WHIP) was created WHIP was authorized in 2017 after hurricanes destroyed farms along the east coast. In June 2019 WHIP became WHIP+ to aid those who suffered eligible crop losses due to floods, snowstorms, tornadoes, and wildfires in 2018 and 2019. Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) pushed for an additional 1.5 billion in December of 2019 to continue the program into 2020 due to blizzard and flood damage that hit North Dakota in the fall of 2019. The program acts like a booster shot to insurance.
“Up until this spring we’ve been experiencing a steady increase in dryness or close to a drought, only getting a half hay crop or just living rainstorm to rainstorm. We applied for WHIP+ due to a snow event last fall for snow and flooding. It’s tough keeping up with farming and filing paperwork for all of these programs they keep coming up with. Even hearing and knowing about new programs is a challenge.”
-Travis Anderson
How WHIP+ Works
Imagine that a farmer has 5 fields. 1 is by the river and the other 4 are on higher ground. The farmer has crop insurance on all fields. The river field floods and the crop is completely unharvestable. There is a record crop this year on the other 4 fields produce the amount of all 5 fields 5 year average. WHIP+ only pays for crops lost if the operation didn’t meet the average yield produced over the last 5 years. The government would look at the flooded field and wouldn’t pay for any of it because the operation produced what it should normally produce. If those fields made 90% of the five year average whip would only give 10% back. WHIP+ prioritizes farming operations that bought higher crop coverage insurance over those that had little to none and favors the larger operations that have the extra capital to buy insurance. If the operation has a lower amount of insurance or none WHIP will pay even less money. Another requirement was that all crops grown on an operation had to be harvested to apply delaying aid when farmers couldn’t reach their fields to harvest.
WHIP+ does not allow farmers to profit and assumes that paying farmers the 5 year average yield at current prices is enough to break even. What could’ve been a chance to build savings for a lean year or pay off current debt turns into barely keeping the operation solvent or going deeper into debt. While not perfect, these payments combined with the Market Facilitation Payments of the Trade War with China are barely keeping our farm economy from collapsing. When an industry gets preferential treatment for too long political support begins to waiver after a few years. Patience is running out in Washington, and political pressure may kill any future bailouts for farmers if there isn’t stability soon.
“The only real weather-related disaster relief given up here in the Red River Valley, was relief for the sugar beets frozen in the ground for the sugar beet farmers. Representative Colin Peterson (MN-DFL) and Senator Hoeven (ND-R) managed to take a billion and a half dollars of taxpayers money and bailed out Crystal Sugar to help keep the sugar beet farmers afloat (WHIP+ relief).“
-Todd Leake
“I’m struggling to remember the last time I sold my spring wheat for above 5 dollars a bushel, I know that it hasn’t been in the last 2 or 3 years for sure. If you factor in inflation and operating costs my returns are getting lower every year. It’s getting harder to find a crop that is profitable nowadays. Corn, wheat, and soybeans are all having a tough time finding a decent price.”
-Tyler Stafslien
Wheat Suffers
North Dakota experienced tough years for wheat farmers in the past 3 years. It is a state that was built on wheat farming, loss of harvest and low prices affects almost all farmers who have it in their rotation. Soybeans and corn markets typically dominate the headlines in the newspaper, but wheat has been quietly suffering from low market prices since 2015. This is due to decreased demand for bread worldwide and the loss of markets such as China during the trade war.
“The wheat market suffered horribly because of a weather event where the quality of the crop was poor. After harvesting and paying my expenses I lost a lot of money, despite getting a huge yield last year. While the grain quality was lower, my crop insurance was geared towards yield loss and harvest calculated price, not the real price you receive, so it was ineffective in my case because they would not allow for a lot of the quality factors and I received very low price and they use the calculated harvest price. Some farmers including myself didn’t even harvest part or all of their crop this year.”
-Donnie Nelson
North Dakota has more wheat acres planted on average than soybeans and corn combined. The climate, soil, and flatlands are ideal for wheat, but it is extremely sensitive to heavy rains and drought. In 2017 40% of the wheat crop was in poor or very poor condition according to the US Drought Monitor project. In 2020 the USDA estimates the amount of wheat planted in 2020 is 44.3 million acres, down 2% from last year, the lowest since records began in 1919. Flooding has affected thousands of acres in North Dakota.
Crops go Unharvested
Almost 50% of the corn crop was unharvested in North Dakota in 2019. With so many unharvested acres in the fall and spring, many North Dakota farmers are unable to plant new crops. Unplanted crops in 2020 will be a problem because farmers sell their crops to generate income.
“Despite the bad weather, I got my crops off, but others weren’t so lucky. Because of the weather some people around this area didn’t harvest their corn until the spring or even summer. They didn’t get their last year’s corn ground planted because the remnants of the corn crop kept the ground too wet to get into the fields in the fall and spring. ”
-Todd Leake
Unharvested fields also made crop rotation harder for wheat farmers. Most farmers in southwest North Dakota are no-till farmers so they can retain topsoil and prevent erosion on their fields. For no-till farming the ground needs to be dry and residue, the biomass that accumulates on fields in the form of weeds or leftover harvested plant matter, needs to be kept under control. Under normal circumstances with regular harvests wheat farmers have no problems with residue. A whole unharvested crop is too much material to penetrate the soil. The seeding machinery plugged up causing costly downtime for maintenance and delays planting elsewhere. Wheat Farmers are now forced to make the choice between wasting overhead costs that they’ll never recoup harvesting an unsellable crop to not damage their soil or damage their soil by tilling the field to plant and sell a new crop.
Read our next article, Farmers and Ranchers in Crisis: COVID Hits.