From rags to riches. From feast to famine. From pauper to prince. We’ve all heard the phrases to describe going from one extreme condition to the opposite. But farmers in North Carolina understand this concept first hand. Unfortunately.

In 2011, just about every imaginable weather disaster hit the state. It started with frigid cold, moved on to a sweltering heat wave, interspersed with a historic tornado outbreak and then hurricane flooding.

In 2012, started out with much of the state experiencing a severe drought, but thankfully Mother Nature eventually dealt a kinder hand to farmers in the Tar Heel state than most of the rest of the county, who experienced the worst drought since the Dust Bowl.

This unending rollercoaster of weather extremes underscores the reason why year after year, farmers across the country happily purchase crop insurance to help mitigate the unknowns that are never far from hand. In the past, disasters like these would have triggered large disaster relief bills, much like what was passed after Hurricane Sandy.

Those bills were costly – 42 such bills have cost taxpayers roughly $70 billion since 1989 – and slow in delivery, and dealt with disasters after they happened. Crop insurance policies, by comparison, force farmers to think about their risk management plans before planting. Policies are purchased at the beginning season, and if disaster strikes, it takes a month or less, not a year, for assistance to arrive.

The passage of the Farm Bill in both the House and Senate will mark a new chapter in U.S. farm policy. The days of direct payments to farmers will be gone as well as many of the large commodity support programs. Left in their place is crop insurance, a public-private partnership whereby farmers purchase individual policies that are tailored to their specific needs, and are sold, serviced and delivered by participating companies. As Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow pointed out, when a farmer signs up for crop insurance, “the farmer gets a bill, not a check.”

The key to the success of crop insurance is its affordability, thanks to a premium discount from the federal government, combined with its ubiquity, meaning that any farmer who wishes to purchase a policy must be sold one at a price set by the federal government, regardless of that farmer’s risk profile. And unlike the past, taxpayers aren’t stuck footing the bill alone.

Farmers wishing to be protected by crop insurance must purchase it with money out of their own pockets. Since 2000, farmers have spent $38 billion doing just that, protecting crops ranging from corn and soybeans to apples, pears, blueberries and tomatoes.

The reason why crop insurance is so successful is that it is widely purchased, with roughly 90 percent of all planted cropland protected in 2013. And since so many farmers had bountiful harvests in 2013, more than half a million of the farmers who purchased crop insurance never collected an indemnity.

But some crop insurance critics are calling for a major policy change, called means testing. Means testing is a bad idea because it would force many large or highly successful farmers to pay more for their federal crop insurance coverage, which could reduce the amount of insurance they purchase, leaving many acres with inadequate coverage. Fewer acres covered mean more expensive premiums for everyone else, including small and mid-size farmers.

Why? Because if the biggest farmers, who tend to be the least risky, are driven out, the pool of insureds shrinks and thus the risk for those remaining gets larger. For example, if a company selling car insurance excludes the best drivers from their pool of insureds, the only drivers left would be those who are the riskiest, and thus the costliest to insure. This fact would drive up the premiums for all remaining drivers, or in this case, farmers.

Facing extreme conditions is part of farming that will always be with us. But for the sake of the rural economy and the many rural Americans who depend on it, keeping crop insurance robust and widely available is the best thing we can do for both farmers and consumers alike.

William “Midge” Tankard farms corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum and tobacco and lives in Bath, NC. This op-ed appeared in the Fayetteville Observer on December 4, 2013.

Although Tim Totheroh says that his last name is “Pennsylvania Dutch,” he’s 100 percent Illinois farm boy, having spent his entire life on a farm near Wellington, Illinois.

Totheroh, who farms 850 acres of corn and soybeans, is also a crop insurance adjuster, which gave him unique insight into the historic drought of 2012. Totheroh says that in all of his years of farming, he’s never seen anything quite like last summer. “I entered a corn field and walked half a mile, turned and walked a half a mile in the other direction,” he said. “And I didn’t see a single ear of corn. Not one single ear.”

Totheroh said that sometimes he’d walk through a field and happen upon a small portion of corn that fared a little better. “Every here and there, you’d find a part of the field that got lucky and had a shower or two more than the rest, and you’d have 180 bushels in that one little spot. But then the rest of the field was just awful,” he said.

Totheroh said that thankfully, not all farmers suffered such extreme losses. “Some of the new hybrid varieties helped farmers a bit because the plants were more efficient at using what little moisture fell,” he said. But for most farmers, who are accustomed to getting about 180 bushels of corn per acre, the losses were substantial. “Last year, I walked a lot of fields that had 80 to 100 bushels per acre,” he said. “We just had half a corn crop around here, basically.”

Totheroh noted that losses of that magnitude are hard to handle, particularly for the younger and new farmers, who are just getting started and are thus more vulnerable. “There aren’t a lot of new farmers, unfortunately, but the ones who were coming into the business last year were shocked by how bad it was,” he said. “Even if they had spent their whole lives growing up on a farm, they had never experienced anything like that,” he said.

“Thankfully, most of those young farmers had purchased crop insurance, which allowed them to put their worries on the back burner a little and focus on what they could do to make the most of the hand they had been dealt,” he said. Totheroh noted that while crop insurance premiums are not cheap, it is often money well spent. “Most farmers around here purchase crop insurance, and most rarely collect on their policies,” he added.

Totheroh explained that while Illinois generally has consistently good corn crops, there is an area not far from his farm that has had three really bad years in a row. “Without crop insurance, those guys would be out of business,” he said. And that is due to no fault of their own, just three bad years where Mother Nature had thrown them a curve ball,” he said.

Totheroh noted that this year, despite a cold wet start, the corn crop looks much better and farmers are feeling far more optimistic, with some forecasts predicting the largest corn crop in U.S. history. “The young farmers are very upbeat too,” he noted. “They weathered a bad year, saw how well their insurance worked, and they know that if they purchase crop insurance, they have a backstop if the floor drops out from under them,” he said. “They’re not going to necessarily lose everything just because of a bad year.”

Sometimes, timing is everything. And for fresh fruits and vegetables, there has been a recent convergence of trends and preferences that bode well for the industry.

The first is the federal government’s decision to ensure that more fresh fruits and vegetables are consumed as part of the school meal programs, which will expose children who would otherwise have limited access to these important foods. The other trend is the locavore – or eating local – movement, that underscores the importance of buying local and eating fresh produce.

But to ensure that fresh fruits and vegetables are available for a population that is increasingly asking for them, we need to have wise public policies in place that help the farmers who grow these important foods to manage the many risks they face brought on by Mother Nature.

And for specialty crop growers – farmers who grow this nation’s fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts and berries – the quintessential risk management tool is crop insurance.

Many of the public policies that underpin food production – typically known as farm programs – chiefly support the major food and feed commodities like corn, wheat and soybeans. Those crops and the programs that support them are critical and have been a major factor behind why the United States is a global player in food production.

But for those raising specialty crops, crop insurance is the only public policy tool available to deal with extreme weather patterns. Crop insurance is a public-private partnership whereby farmers purchase their own policies to cover the risks they choose to pay for. And farmers are quite happy to purchase it, having spent $4.1 billion out of their own pockets in 2012.

There has been a lot of media attention about the historic drought of 2012, and deservedly so. But that drought was preceded by a very devastating late spring freeze here in New England that nearly wiped out a year’s worth of income for many of the growers who raise this nation’s fresh apples.

Without the protection of crop insurance, these growers might have been completely knocked out of business from such a devastating freeze. And the ones who hadn’t purchased crop insurance might have been. But the majority of the region’s farmers who purchase crop insurance every year, were able to bounce back from the freeze, continue to care for their orchards and prepare for the 2013 crop.

But having just one bad year would have actually been good news for me. Six out the last seven years, I’ve had hail damage on my apple crop. Last year, I lost 90 percent of my apple crop on that late frost and then the other ten percent was demolished by hail. For my peaches, another big crop on my farm, I’ve also had major losses 6 out of the last 7 years. Needless to say, if I hadn’t purchased crop insurance, I would have had many lean years in a row.

Since crop insurance is sold, managed and delivered by the private sector, when disaster strikes, indemnity checks usually arrive less than a month after the paperwork is completed. In the past, when farmers would rely on disaster assistance from the federal government, it took months, or more than a year in some cases, for those funds to finally reach the hands of the growers who had lost everything. And for a grower whose entire apple crop has just been frozen, a year can be about 11 months too long.

Crop insurance is available for 128 different crops, and that list is expanding. In some ways, the abundance of America’s farm sector seems like a miracle, but it’s not. If it weren’t for hard work, investment, infrastructure and crop insurance to manage some of the major risks, there might be a lot fewer consumers enjoying America’s fresh fruits and vegetables.

Tom March grows fruits and vegetables on his farm, which has been in the family since 1915, in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

This op-ed appeared in the Hartford Courant on July 29, 2013.

By Mark Gerdes

One of the beauties of life in our great democracy is that spirited debate about important public policies is not only expected, it’s encouraged. One of the intrinsic rules of these discussions, if they are to be productive and fair, is that the policy itself should be scrutinized from every angle without demonizing or castigating the various groups affected by these policies.

In other words, we should be able to discuss education policy without demonizing teachers or impugning the integrity of students. Likewise, we should be able to debate defense policy without bashing soldiers or peace activists. Unfortunately, when it comes to discussions about farm policy — in particular the decision by many farmers to purchase crop insurance — critics have chosen to throw farmers under the bus time and time again instead of debating the policies on their merits.

Last year, we had one of the worst droughts our nation has seen in decades. And while America’s farm families watched their crops shrivel in the fields, some critics said “farmers are praying for drought, not praying for rain.” Another critic said that farmers who purchased crop insurance last summer “were laughing all the way to the bank.” In short, they argued farmers make more money from collecting a crop insurance check than harvesting a crop, and in fact they would prefer to watch their crops wither or livestock die and collect a crop insurance check than to take the fruits of their labors to market.

As a farmer, I must point out that statements about the integrity and motivation of farmers and their decision to purchase crop insurance demonstrates both incredibly poor math skills as well as a complete lack of understanding about the core values and beliefs of America’s farmers.

Take, for example, the charge that farmers hope their crops will fail so that they can collect a crop insurance check. Critics are quick to point out that more than $17 billion will be paid out to farmers and ranchers who purchased crop insurance for their losses in 2012. The implication here is that the $17 billion is some sort of windfall being bestowed upon farmers by the federal government.

But the math tells a very different story. Insurance policies must first be purchased, and then policy holders must absorb the policy’s deductible after suffering a verifiable loss, before they can collect a single dime. In 2012, farmers paid $4.1 billion out of their own pockets to purchase crop insurance policies. Then, farmers shouldered $12.7 billion…

Mark Gerdes, a fourth-generation farmer, raises corn, soybeans and cattle on 2,800 acres in Aredale, Iowa. This op-ed appeared in the Ames Tribune on June 7, 2013.