USDA RMA has a tool to help you estimate what federal (RMA) crop insurance will cost. Here is the link to the estimator. It is not easy to find on their website and a little clunky to use, but you can compare different products head-to-head.

In this article I will walk you through using it.

When you are on the first page for “Personalized Estimate” under Commodity Year choose the current year. You may see the next year as an option. We are in 2024 and 2025 is an option. If you will be buying crop insurance for 2024 for 2025, then you will select 2025 – but it may be that some products (like whole farm revenue insurance) are not available for 2025 yet, so for that program 2024 is the most recent option so choose that. Under Insurance Plan you will see a bunch of options. For fruit and vegetable farms in New York here are the primary choices:

• APH 90 – this is the single-crop, yield-based insurance program. It covers apples, peaches, grapes, onions, cabbage green beans etc… You will choose the commodity on the next page.
• Dollar Amount of Insurance 50 – covers sweet corn and nursery/greenhouse crops. You also will specific which on the next page.
• Tree based dollar amount of insurance 40 – covers apple trees and grape vines, you will choose which on the next page.
• Whole Farm Revenue Protection (includes Micro Farm) – covers farm revenue. You will choose regular or micro farm on the next page.

Under “State” choose the state where the fields you want to insure are and under “County” choose the county where the fields you want to insure are. NOTE – only states and counties where the insurance plan you have selected is available will be listed as options! If you choose an option, like APH 90 and either the state or the county isn’t listed that means that that program is not available in that county.

On the next page you will specify which crop or program you specifically want an estimate for. You can add more than one crop or option. You will only have the choice of crops or programs that are offered in the state and county you selected. So, for APH 90 in Ulster County, NY the options are Apples, Grapes, Hemp, Peaches and Pears. But in Wayne County, NY APH 90 will cover Apples, Dry Beans, Grapes, Green Peas, Hemp, Onions, Potatoes, Processing Beans and Sweet Corn.

Change “Type” and “Practice” in the drop-down boxes to reflect in more detail what you are actually insuring. Changing these will change the Price Election options. The price is the $/unit that your insurance payment will be based on. So, if you have 10 acres of dry black beans in Wayne County NY (2024) the price is $0.40/lb and your approved yield is 1000 lbs. per acre (a made-up number I am using to make the calculation easy) and I am insuring 60% of my yield, the most I would get back in insurance payments if I had a total loss would be .40 x 10000(.6) = $2,400.

on the next page once you make the adjustments for your farm, you will see the “Liability Amount”, which is the maximum amount of insurance payment you would get for a total loss. You can see it at different levels of coverage. The other tab of interest to you is the Producer Premium Amount shows what your insurance payment would be at each level of coverage.

A limitation to this tool is that it cannot see what affect multiple policies will have on your insurance premium. Covering your crop with more than one policy (for example both whole farm revenue and APH-90) will lower your insurance premium, but the calculation is too complex for this tool.