“It’s just a real good risk management tool. We’re able to have famers pay part of the premium and have government pay part of the premium to make it affordable and it just ensures that if we have tough weather - especially like we’re having now - lots of wildfires in Texas and a lot of flooding in the Midwest, that farmers are able to indeed get enough assistance that they can farm for another year.”
Mary Kay Thatcher, American Farm Bureau Federation Senior Director of Congressional Relations, speaking on crop insurance during an interview with the National Association of Farm Broadcasting on May 13, 2011.
The hopes of the largest and most profitable harvest in U.S. history are being placed into question by a series of historic weather events that are inflicting major damage to America’s agricultural heartland.
There are going to be more challenges to the writing of the 2012 Farm Bill than agriculture has ever seen, said the American Farm Bureau Federation Senior Director of Congressional Relations Mary Kay Thatcher, during a recent interview with the National Association of Farm Broadcasting that ran nationally.
With cuts to the farm safety net slated in the proposed 2012 budget, lawmakers should consider 12 essential strengths that make crop insurance the linchpin of the farm safety net programs. In this on-going series, we’ll introduce one strength of crop insurance per month and explain how the sum of these strengths has given us the successful program we have today. 
