Safety Net Gaps: Why Small, Diversified Farms Are Left Uninsured

Small, diverse farms struggle to access crop-insurance protections

At the Columbia Farmers Market, 13-year-old Valerie Schlapper helps her mother, Abbey Innes, run their stall, which showcases produce from the couple’s 15-acre Howard County farm. A colorful spread of tomatoes, squash, garlic, kale and bouquets makes the table inviting — but that full display hides a recent setback.

“We planted hundreds of pounds of seed potatoes and got 10 inches of rain within 10 days,” Innes recalled. “They drowned; they rotted.” Without a qualifying crop-insurance policy, the loss came entirely out of the family’s pocket.

Crop insurance is intended to protect farmers from weather and market shocks by covering shortfalls in yield or revenue, and the federal government heavily subsidizes the program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates taxpayers will send roughly $13 billion a year directly into the program over the coming decade. Yet that safety net tends to favor large commodity producers.

Coverage skews toward row crops. Ben Brown, an agricultural business and policy specialist with the University of Missouri Extension, says roughly 90–100% of U.S. acreage planted in corn, soybeans and wheat is insured under some crop-insurance product. By contrast, specialty producers of fruits and vegetables face larger barriers to entry: different prices and yields across many crops make underwriting more complicated.

“One of the challenges of developing crop insurance markets for fruit and vegetables is there’s a lot of different prices, and there’s a lot of things that drive those price markets,” said Brown.

The 2014 Farm Bill created Whole-Farm Revenue Protection (WFRP) to help diversified operations by insuring total farm revenue rather than individual crops. But adoption has been limited. Many producers have never heard of WFRP, and some insurance agents either don’t know how to sell it or avoid it because it requires greater recordkeeping and administrative work.

“The system itself is set up where these private insurers and agents are incentivized, in a way, to sell certain policies and not sell others,” said Duncan Orlander, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Smaller policies mean smaller commissions, which can discourage agents from promoting WFRP.

USDA research shows federal crop-insurance dollars are concentrated: in 2022, larger farms received about 80% of crop-insurance payments. That same year, while most row-crop producers had coverage, fewer than 9% of farms growing specialty crops had purchased crop insurance.

Policy design can shape farming choices. Some advocates argue current insurance structures — for example, basing coverage on historical yields — can lock farmers into high-output practices and discourage conservation measures that may reduce short-term yields but improve soil and environmental health over time.

“It’s a perpetuating process here of farmers who don’t want to necessarily change because they don’t want to lose the security of crop insurance,” Orlander said. He and others propose redesigning incentives so insurance supports conservation practices and diversified production rather than penalizing them.

Economist and farmer Cory Walters, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, said crop insurance can enable conservation by providing a revenue floor that makes experimenting with new practices less risky. He suggested linking premium subsidies or other incentives to conservation actions.

Some states already offer such incentives: Iowa, for example, gives premium discounts to farmers who adopt cover crops. Innes uses cover crops on her farm and says they have helped her soil recover and become more resilient — but threats such as excessive rain or wildlife damage, like deer eating potatoes, still leave her exposed without insurance.

What’s next? Advocates and researchers suggest improving outreach about WFRP, reducing administrative burdens, and realigning agent incentives so whole-farm and specialty-crop producers can better access the federal safety net. Without changes, many small, diversified farmers will continue to shoulder weather and market risks unaided.

This story was originally published by KBIA and reported by Missouri News Network photographers.