The 2012 growing season has ended for most of the nation’s farmers, but the drought that dogged many of them appears here to stay. According to the December 11, U.S. Drought Monitor, nearly 62 percent of the continental United States remains in some stage of drought. Forty-three percent of that area is considered to be in severe, extreme or exceptional drought.

Should this weather pattern continue, many farmers would start off the growing season with lower soil moisture contents than they had in 2012. According to the U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook, which forecasts through the end of February 2013, “persistence of drought is deemed the best bet across central and southern portions of the Intermountain Region, the Rockies and the Plains. Persistence of existing drought, or the development of new drought areas are expected in Texas.”

The long dry spell is already taking its toll on the winter wheat crop. USDA says that this year’s wheat crop is the poorest at this stage in development since the agency started tracking crop condition ratings 25 years ago, according to Feedstuffs Online.

In its November 26 “Crop Progress” report, USDA pointed out that only 33% of the wheat crop was rated in good to excellent condition, while twenty-six percent of the crop was rated poor to very poor. Fifty-two percent of last year’s crop, by comparison, earned the top two condition ratings, while only thirteen percent scored in the bottom two tiers.

The persistent lack of rain is not only hurting the Heartland’s farmers, but also other agribusinesses and commerce in general. The ongoing drought is pushing water levels in the Mississippi so low that portions of the river south of St. Louis might have to be closed to shipping soon.

Tom Allegretti, president of American Waterways Operators, says that more than 20,000 jobs are at risk, as well as $130 million in wages and benefits if the river is closed for two months. Allegretti estimates that more than $2.3 billion of agricultural products, $1.8 billion in chemicals and $1.3 billion worth of petroleum products normally ship on the river in December and January.

The choices Illinois farmers faced in the past when drought struck the Midwest were unpleasant all around. They could borrow money from family, drain their hard-earned savings or go under.

In the last decade, crop insurance has made it possible for brothers Robert (Bob) and Michael Buntin, owners of Buntin Bros., Inc. in Thompsonville, to avoid any of that even as this summer’s severe drought hit the state. For those without such a buffer, said Bob, 72, “It’s like losing a job. You get by the best you can.”

Thompsonville, with a population of nearly 600, is bordered on the south by Kentucky and on the east by Indiana.

This past summer, the entire state of Illinois experienced varying degrees of drought — worsened by excessive heat — causing crops to shrivel and die from the blistering temperatures.

The Buntins operate a 5,000-acre family farm, planted to corn, soybeans and wheat. This drought has been the worst since 1988, said Bob, and their yield this year is projected to be a little lower than ever before. From 147 bushels of corn per acre, 60 bushels of wheat and 45 bushels of soybeans, he sees production this year slowing to an average of 15 bushels each for soybeans and corn and “above average” for wheat.

“We’re tired of the dry weather,” he said. “This is the worst this year.”

This year, the brothers wrote a crop insurance premium check for more than a $100,000; “You don’t pay monthly like most insurance companies,” said Bob. “You just write one check.”

And like a regular car insurance policy, they make sure they are covered for one year at a time. “You never know when your car is going to break down. You reapply every year so you can change your options.”

Bob says the process of purchasing crop insurance and filing for a claim is uncomplicated with very little paperwork. “If you keep your records straight, what kind of yield you get and report all these to government offices, it makes it easier,” he said.

“We’re going to be all right this year,” he noted. Such confidence comes from part wisdom, part history: A lower crop production traditionally results in higher prices. The Buntins are buoyed by current market prices at sky-high levels, which, Bob said, “should cover my losses this year.”

The brothers recalled past years when their farm faced weather-related crises. “It was dry here last year, dry here in 1983 and dry here in 1988, and you go back to the 1930s and the ‘50s.”

The U.S. has been experiencing extreme weather over the last few years, with 2012 now judged as the hottest year on record. The number of disasters that have run up costs into the billions of dollars have multiplied sharply since the beginning of the century.

In 2011, the worst drought in a hundred years crippled Texas, the biggest producer of cotton in the U.S. The next year, the drought moved to the Heartland.

But in addition to worrying about the weather, there are some ideas being floated in Congress that are causing some concerns as well. “I don’t think there should be a cap on insurance policy,” Bob mused, arguing how a farmer with 500 acres or 5,000 acres should be allowed to take out a policy based on his own needs.

“You got all the expenses; the big guy’s got more expenses than the little guy, but he’s got expenses, too,” he said. For a farmer who is just getting started, the banks will strongly insist that he get insurance for his own protection “at least to some degree.”

“Even the big, more established farms can’t afford to take a hit three or four years in a row,” said Bob, who has been farming since he was a young man in his teens. And the family tradition of farming will continue as one of Bob’s sons two grandsons have joined him and their uncle in meeting the upcoming challenges to feed a hungry world.

The National Climatic Data Center reported that as the 2012 drought deepened and expanded this summer, it became one of the six largest droughts in modern record keeping. Here in Ohio, you really didn’t need a weather expert to tell you just how bad it was. And before the rains finally came – which were too late for many of crop – the fields were so dry they had cracked, there was only stubble left for cattle to feed on, and creeks and wells were drying up. This has been one of those years that can be full of disappointment for a farmer like me.

Planting this spring the soil looked great, crop prices were high, and there was every indication that a bountiful harvest was a strong possibility. But the rains left and did not return for months, leaving 53 percent of the corn crop in poor or very poor condition, roughly one-third of the soybean crop in poor or very poor condition and almost 70 percent of our pastures the same.

Thankfully, I purchase crop insurance for situations just like this. Crop insurance is a public-private partnership that limits taxpayer exposure to risk – and saving them billions of dollars – and helps farmers get back on our feet when disaster strikes. A crop insurance check does not make a farmer “whole” anymore than an insurance check replaces the home you lost in a fire, but it at least puts us on first base.

Crop insurance has become the key risk management tool for farmers, and the only risk management for some, that last year protected 84 percent of eligible farmland, or roughly 266 million acres. In years past, natural disasters like the drought we are enduring right now, regularly triggered very costly, un-budgeted ad hoc disaster bill from Congress, costing taxpayers $45 billion from FY1989 to FY2001. By comparison, the fact that most farmers purchase crop insurance has negated the need for large disaster bills for crops. Because of the way crop insurance works, when disaster does strike, the cost is partially shouldered by private sector insurance companies. This is a good, fiscally responsible move for farm policy. That’s because the move from ad hoc disaster bills to private crop insurance policies has saved billions of taxpayer dollars. In fact, taxpayer spending for farm safety net programs as a whole has dropped from $19.2 billion in 2002 to an estimated $12.3 billion in 2011, a 36 percent decline.

Many Ohio farmers who are collecting crop insurance checks this year have never filed a claim. Those profits, in addition to the $3.5 billion the federal government has made in underwriting gains, will help pay for these and similar big losses. Last year, there was a string of natural disasters, including drought, wildfires, floods, freezes, hurricanes and tropical storms, which allowed crop insurance to show its steel.

Despite farm disasters from coast to coast, there wasn’t a single call for a disaster bill from Washington. Why? Because farmers had spent $4.5 billion of their own money to purchase crop insurance. Insurance dollars are already flowing into the state to help farmers meet their cash flow demands. In fact, more than $16 million in indemnities have already landed in the hands of Ohio farmers, which will help them make it through an otherwise lean year. It took months, or years, for cash from government programs of the past to find their way to farmers.

But there are those who are making uninformed and uneducated criticisms about crop insurance – and America’s farmers – in the midst of this national tragedy. According to the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, farmers have been “praying for drought, not rain.” Really? I’ve seen a lot of looks on the faces of my fellow farmers this past summer, as their crops and have withered despite their best efforts and their hopes for a great harvest have been dashed. And for the record, none of those looks have been smiles of greed about a check for an insurance policy they bought. Nor have I heard much laughter. Tears of frustration, maybe. Laughter, not so much.

The rains have returned to the Buckeye state but for the most part, it’s too little, too late for the corn crop. Thankfully most of us have purchased crop insurance policies, and will bounce back and be planting again next year.

This op-ed, written by Custar, Ohio farmer, Mark Drewes, appeared in the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune on September 18, 2012.

A drought specialist with the national weather service recently compared the drought and heat wave here in the Midwest with the catastrophic dry period of 1988 that at the time cost agriculture $78 billion. This year’s weather pattern, which settled into the Great Plains and the Southwest last year and has spread into the Corn Belt, resembles those of a quarter century ago, he noted.

USDA Chief Economist Joe Glauber recently said that “49 percent of the corn crop, 50 percent of the soybean crop, and 45 percent of the hay crop are all in areas that are experiencing drought,” adding that a lot of that area is actually in the “severe drought” category. For consumers, this drought could spell higher food prices as food and feed supplies tighten further and global demand continues to rise.

For farmers and ranchers ­ who in 2011 experienced one of the most disastrous weather years in history ­ this could mean yet another year of dismal harvests and dashed hopes. Thankfully, the vast majority of U.S. farmers purchase crop insurance policies, which last year covered 84 percent of eligible lands, protecting 266 million acres of crops.

But the agricultural destruction experienced in 2011 — which ranged from drought in the plains to flooding in the Midwest and Delta regions to freezes in Florida and Hurricane Irene on the East Cost — differed from previous years. In the past, large natural disasters would have triggered nearly immediate and always expensive ad hoc farm disaster bills in Congress. Last year, there were none.

Why? Because crop insurance, the public-private partnership designed to encourage the private sector to sell and service policies, was in place and working to help America¹s farmers pick themselves up when Mother Nature struck. Crop insurance is the most widely used and popular risk management tool available to farmers today.

This past year, as Congress began writing the 2012 Farm Bill, farmers and ranchers from each corner of the country and nearly every major commodity group came to Washington to testify about what that Farm Bill needed to do. There was one main theme that threaded through their testimony: “Do no harm to crop insurance.”

Unfortunately, an amendment in the recently passed Senate Farm Bill could harm the crop insurance system by mandating means testing to farmers who seek to purchase crop insurance. This might sound like a common-sense amendment at first glance, but what is important to remember is that crop insurance is purchased by the farmers themselves, so trying to make crop insurance sound like some government handout is very misleading.

Means testing could potentially disrupt the whole system because crop insurance, like other forms of insurance, relies on large pools of policy holders, who are all interconnected, meaning that less risky producers make policies more affordable for the riskier producers. In laymen¹s terms, that means that the well-financed, established farmers make policies more affordable for the less established, heavily-leveraged farmers or new farmers seeking to enter agriculture for the first time.

For those of you who don¹t farm, think of it this way. If a car insurance plan removed all of the most experienced and safest drivers from the pool of the insured, the cost for the remaining participants would increase because the low cost members were no longer there to balance out the high cost members. The same is true with crop insurance.

Without an adequate pool of insured participants, the whole system could collapse, making it much more difficult to secure insurance policies or to quickly collect indemnities when disaster strikes.

It’s important that this idea gets stopped in its tracks in the House Farm Bill, which will soon be written and then debated later this summer. An effective insurance program requires more acres in the program, not less. Means testing and arbitrary caps on crop insurance will reduce participation and hurt everyone in the system, including consumers.

The crop insurance system has helped American farmers survive the mishaps of Mother Nature last year, and it will do it again if it’s not undermined. Last year, farmers received nearly $11 billion in indemnities for the damages and losses they incurred over the course of the year. And hopefully, we can maintain crop insurance in its current form, because the current system works for both farmers and consumers.

Mike Pfantz is a crop insurance agent from Omaha, Nebraska. This op-ed appeared in the Lincoln Journal-Star on July 13, 2012.