Climate change could deliver considerable blows to US corn growers, insurers: Study

Federal corn crop insurers could see a 22 percent spike in claims filed by 2030 and a nearly 29 percent jump by midcentury, thanks to the impacts of climate change, a new study has found.

Both U.S. corn growers and their insurers are poised to face a future with mounting economic uncertainty, according to the research, published on Friday in the Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualisation.

“Crop insurance has increased 500 percent since the early 2000s, and our simulations show that insurance costs will likely double again by 2050,” said lead author Sam Pottinger, a senior researcher at the Center for Data Science & Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement.

“This significant increase will result from a future in which extreme weather events will become more common, which puts both growers and insurance companies at substantial risk,” he warned.

Pottinger and his colleagues at UC Berkeley and the University of Arkansas developed an open-source, AI-powered tool through which they were able to simulate growing conditions through 2050 under varying scenarios.

They found that if growing conditions remained unchanged, federal crop insurance companies would see a continuation of current claim rates in the next three decades.

However, under different climate change scenarios, claims could rise by anywhere from 13 percent to 22 percent by 2030, before reaching about 29 percent by 2050, according to the data.

Federal crop insurance, distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides economic stability to U.S. farmers and other agricultural entities, the researchers explained.

Most U.S. farmers receive their primary insurance through this program, with coverage determined by a grower’s annual crop yield, per the terms of the national farm bill.

“Not only do we see the claims’ rate rise significantly in a future under climate change, but the severity of these claims increases too,” said co-author Lawson Conner, an assistant professor in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas, in a statement.

“For example, we found that insurance companies could see the average covered portion of a claim increase up to 19 percent by 2050,” Conner noted.

The researchers stressed the utility of their tool for people who want to understand how crop insurance prices are established and foresee potential neighborhood-level impacts.

To achieve greater security for growers and reduce financial liability for companies in the future, the authors suggested two possible avenues.

The first, they contended, could involve a small change to the farm bill text that could incentivize farmers to adopt practices such as cover cropping and crop rotation. Although these approaches can lead to lower annual yields, they bolster crop resilience over time, the authors noted.

Their second recommendation would  involve including similar such incentives in an existing USDA Risk Management Agency mechanism called 508(h), through which private companies recommend alternative and supplemental insurance products for the agency’s consideration.

“We are already seeing more intense droughts, longer heat waves, and more catastrophic floods,” co-author Timothy Bowles, associate professor in environmental science at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. 

“In a future that will bring even more of these, our recommendations could help protect growers and insurance providers against extreme weather impacts,” Bowles added.