With claims still streaming in — only an estimated 81 percent of expected claims have been finalized — crop insurance companies have already paid out a record $9.1 billion in indemnity payments to America’s farmers in 2011. This has already surpassed the former record of $8.67 billion in indemnities paid in 2008, according to USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA).
“Working as designed since 2008, more than $27 billion in private-backed crop insurance payouts over the past four years have helped farmers pick up the pieces after natural disasters or market drops,” said Keith Collins, former USDA Chief Economist. “Without crop insurance in place, those billions in damages would have fallen onto the laps of lenders, input suppliers, marketers, land owners and farm families, just as the economy was spiraling downward and unemployment was soaring,” he said.
Agriculture is a unique industry in so many ways. One particular way—it is perhaps the only area of the federal budget to have shrunk in the past 10 years, yielding cuts even as it was coming in under budget.
As the United States Congress begins debate of the 2012 Farm Bill, America’s biggest competitors on the global marketplace have been steadily increasing their rates of subsidization, according to 
