PRF West Insurance Services, LLC
Pasture Rangeland and Forage PRF Insurance Program was created to assist in protecting your operation if there is a lack of precipitation. This can impact the growth of your product (or by-product that feeds your animals).
PRF Insurance is very simple, no record keeping or claims required.
You and your Insurance Agent will determine the intervals that are the most volatile and most likely to affect your product that results in a loss. You can select the period that is most important to your operation. For instance, if precipitation in January is important to the beginning process of growing each year and this January is dry (below average precipitation), the PRF Insurance would kick in and cover you for potential loss. That is, if you had the Jan/Feb interval chosen for coverage. You can select a coverage level from 70-90%. You are essentially insuring a rainfall index that is expected to estimate production.
It is important that you work with your crop agent to make decisions on all the different choices to make, such as: coverage level, index intervals, irrigated practice, productivity factor, and the number of acres you wish to insure (as you don’t have to insure all of them). You and your Crop Agent should take a look at the Grid ID Locator map and index grids for your area to determine where to assign acreage on the grid or grids.
We have a team of experienced Crop Agents who are familiar and working with The Pasture, Rangeland, and Forage (PRF) Insurance Program with our customers. Please give us a call to learn more! The closing date to purchase this insurance for coverage NEXT year is November 15th. So, don’t waste time- we’re here, ready to help! Thank you for visiting us today. We hope to hear from you!
The following questions and answers are pulled directly from the United States Department of Agriculture. View the full list here.
The PRF policy is an area-based insurance plan that covers perennial pasture, rangeland, or forage used to feed livestock. It provides producers a risk management tool to cover the precipitation needed to produce forage for their operation.
RI-PRF is being offered in all 48 contiguous states. The expansion for the 2017 crop year covered over 650 million haying and grazing acres. All counties within those 48 states were offered RI-PRF. A few producers did not have coverage because the majority of their grid crossed over either the northern or southern United States borders.
Producers must choose at least two, 2-month periods when precipitation is important for forage growth for their operation. These periods are called index intervals. RMA uses NOAA CPC data to calculate normal precipitation and deviations from normal precipitation
Area-based means payments are not based on an individual rancher’s experience; rather, payments are based on a grid’s deviation from normal experience. For example, under the Rainfall Index, if your ranch received a surplus of rain, but the area in your grid was below average, you could receive a payment or vice versa.
NOAA CPC is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center, which is the data set used in the PRF Program.
The Rainfall Index uses NOAA CPC Daily Precipitation Data that interpolates precipitation to the grid. RMA compares the compiled data for each 2-month interval with the historical precipitation data for the same period that is normally expected in the grid.