Last year, the U.S. faced its fourth most costly year of extreme weather, contributing to more than $20 billion in agricultural losses. As this trend of increasingly extreme weather continues, modernizing agricultural insurance in the U.S. is a crucial step toward protecting farmers’ financial stability and reducing the risks they face when transitioning to climate-resilient practices.
In conversations with farmers in recent months, one word keeps coming up to describe their economic reality: “squeeze.” High farm input costs and loan interest rates are making it more expensive for farmers to grow crops. At the same time, low commodity prices mean they earn less money for the crops they grow. Farmers are caught in the middle of a bad deal with many asking whether it is even worth it to farm this year.
Farmers are facing this dilemma while also navigating additional disruptions and uncertainty. Federal funds have been frozen or canceled, putting farmers with existing contracts at risk after they’ve already invested their own money with the expectation that government funding would cover the remaining cost of farm improvements. Tariffs create another layer of price uncertainty and open the door for other countries to gain a competitive advantage in global markets. On top of this, farmers in several regions have experienced damage from extreme weather events, making their financial situation even more fraught.
Farmers are getting squeezed, and this makes it harder or even impossible for them to position their businesses for long-term success. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A farmer stands in a field of soybean crop and corn residue, facing a glowing sunset.
From extensive droughts across the Great Plains and back-to-back hurricanes damaging vegetable and citrus crops in the Southeast, the last two production seasons have demonstrated the intensifying damage of extreme weather on America’s farms. In 2023 alone, natural disasters caused nearly $22 billion in crop and rangeland losses. While crop insurance is a critical safety net for farmers, the growing impact of climate change underscores the need for proactive resilience strategies on the farm.
Recognizing this, Chubb and its crop insurance division Rain & Hail — the largest crop and agriculture insurance provider in the U.S. — has launched a new resource hub designed to equip farmers and crop insurance agents with essential tools, insights and advisors to increase on-farm resilience. Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps fellow Carter Purcell led the development of the hub during her time at Chubb.
The new resource hub highlights the increasing need for comprehensive risk management solutions that not only protect farms financially in the short term, but also support long-term resilience.
Learn more about the relationship between crop insurance and resilience to extreme weather, and why it’s critical to provide solutions that support farmers’ short- and long-term financial resilience.
