With some of the severe weather West Texas has experienced over the last few months, farmers are feeling a bit of a sting.
With 40 years of experience, Walt Hagood said he continues to harvest cotton crops. However, this year his crops are putting up with all sorts of severe weather damage, he said.
“One thing I’ve noticed is we’ve had multiple events of weather and pretty much every cloud has had some kind of hail in it or high wind,” Hagood said. “It’s been more intense this season.”
He’s even had to re-plant, and it can cost farmers thousands of dollars to start from scratch.
“If you look at the price we receive for our commodities, it’s not much more than we received 40 years ago, in some cases, it’s less,” Hagood said.
So, Hagood said he turns to crop insurance to help protect what he works hard to grow.
“Without crop insurance, there’s not any way to cover [the costs] if anything happens to your crop,” Hagood said.
Joey Brown, a crop insurance agent at Joe Brown Crop Insurance, said a multi-peril policy will cover a lot of different losses from hail damage to drought.
“If you’re a farmer with 100% share of that ground, meaning you own that piece of ground to plant cotton, you can spend anywhere from $20 to $60 an acre for the insurance and that’s your cost,” Brown said.
He said the insurance allows farmers to feel secure if they lose a crop after natural disasters.
“The word necessary is very important there cause lenders need it to lend the money to the farmer but the farmer needs it just to be ablet to go out and do it,” Brown said.
Brown said growing cotton is an extremely expensive endeavor. However, he went on to say it creates wealth for the nation as a whole.
“The federal government comes in and provides a helping hand with that process,” Brown said.
Crop insurance is purchased by agricultural producers and sub-sized by the federal government.
