While many farmers don’t even know it’s available, a new video featuring Scott Silveus, president and CEO of Silveus Insurance Group, brings the benefits of federally-subsidized Pasture, Rangeland and Forage Insurance (PRF) out from behind the rain clouds.
“Of all the insurance products I‘ve seen in my life, I’ve never seen a product that stayed hidden as long as PRF,” Silveus says. “Most people with hay ground, with pasture ground: they don’t realize that they have a subsidized insurance option. PRF is a product that pays you when average rainfall drops.”
Extremely affordable because it is subsidized, PRF offsets the cost of additional livestock feed expenses in times of drought. A PRF policy is simple, no need to submit a loss claim or to notify your agent of a claim and protects up to 90% of normal rainfall on grass and hay land.
“Looking at the PRF policy might make you think it’s kind of a random process,” Silveus observes. “And it can be, if you’re making your decisions in the dark. What we do is, we go back and look at the historical rainfall to help you decide not only when indemnities could have been generated due to low rainfall, but when you need it. When do you need the rain?”
Silveus Insurance Group helps farmers balance decisions about where to put their insurance – what months, what intervals to select – using proprietary, RangeCalc software to turn rainfall data into knowledge, creating a custom plan that fits each farmer’s operation. The software calculates a Rainfall Index (RI) as a risk management tool, providing visibility into which time periods a farmer might want to insure against a rainfall decline. It’s based on the long-term historical average precipitation for an approximate 12×12 mile grid over specific, two-month time intervals.
“You pick the specific intervals that you want to protect against low rainfall,” Scott Silveus explains. A minimum of two index intervals must be selected for acreage insured under the plan. The insured selects which index intervals to cover, and the amount of coverage.
Coverage is based on indexes for areas on the grid – not the producer’s actual rainfall. Why? Even though the U.S. government operates more than 9,000 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Stations across the country, it is impossible to accurately monitor the precipitation every ranch actually receives. Instead, monitoring a given area’s precipitation relative to history forms the basis for the index — and makes PRF risk protection possible.
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