Thank a Farmer, It’s Thanksgiving and They Helped Make It Possible
As your family sits down to a Thanksgiving meal this week, take a look around at all the wonderful food and consider where it came from.
The sweet potatoes, peas, corn, rice and the wheat in the bread. The cranberries in the sauce and the sugar and pumpkin in the pie. The onions and tomatoes in the salad. The almonds that might be on your green beans.
American farmers brought all this to your table. This week, we are thankful for their hard work and the great risk they took in spending their time and money growing the food we enjoy as our Thanksgiving Day meal.
Just as we give thanks to farmers, they are thankful for the crop insurance that allows them to bring us a Thanksgiving meal every year.
Crop insurance covers most every crop that goes into the food on your table today – not to mention the clothes on your back.
In fact, it covers more than 130 different crops grown on 290 million acres in the United States with an insured value of $100 billion.
For the food made with crops that are not covered, we can all be thankful that crop insurance is built so it can expand as needed. Any farmer, or farm group, or university researcher can design an insurance tool to cover an uncovered crop and take it to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for consideration.
And more and more growers want to make sure policies are tailored to their specific needs. That’s because crop insurance is a cornerstone of America’s farm safety net that helps farmers pick up the pieces after a flood destroys their pumpkin fields or a storm knocks down all the corn stalks.
It’s not a handout. Just like with any other insurance, farmers pay premiums and must meet deductibles before policies cover losses. And those losses are investigated by trained adjusters.
Sure, the insurance doesn’t cover all of a farmer’s losses just like most car insurance won’t buy you a brand-new car after a wreck. But, crop insurance offers farmers a chance to stay in business year after year with unpredictable Mother Nature and volatile world prices.
For that, we should all be thankful.
