Independent agents servicing crop insurance clients have two new tools with which to assist farmers.
The University of Illinois announced this week a complete revamp of the crop insurance setion of its farmdoc website and the release of two new web-based decision tools: the iFarm Premium Calculator and the iFarm Insurance Evaluator.
The tools provide farmer-paid premiums for insurance products on a per acre basis and performance evaluations of alternative products for a case farm within a county.
“As crop insurance decisions loom for farmers, we expect these two new online tools will help ease the process,” said Gary Schnitkey, an agricultural economist with the University of Illinois who helped create the tools.
The two programs were developed with the assistance of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the school.
According to a news release, iFarm Crop insurance Premium Calculator allows users to develop customized estimates of their insurance premiums, and compare revenue and yield guarantees across all available crop insurance products and elections for their actual farm case.
The calculator works by allowing a detailed comparison between farm-level and area-level insurance products in terms of cost and guarantee values. Specific case details can be included, as well as a tool for users to calculate their TA-Adjusted APH. It also uses current price and volatility conditions, and will reflect current market conditions through the final release of 2016 Projected Prices and Volatilities by RMA.
The iFarm Payment Evaluator, meanwhile, develops a case farm for most counties in the corn and soybean regions and provides premium estimates for all products based on coverage level, expected frequency of payments, average payment per acre, net cost per acre and risk reductions associated with alternative crop insurance products and election levels.
“Evaluations of crop insurance are available for corn and soybeans in the Midwest, Great Plains and eastern United States,” Schnitkey said. “The tools are also scalable to different platforms including laptop computers, tablets and phones.”
