The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is further expanding the opportunities for producers to consider Enterprise Units as risk management options. The USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) is expanding Enterprise Unit availability to additional specialty crops and other actual production history (APH) crop programs. Together with the six crop types announced July 6, 2023, for Enterprise Unit protection, these crops could benefit from the availability of Enterprise Units where they were previously unavailable. This expansion meets producer requests for Enterprise Units and will provide producers with more options to manage their risk.

An Enterprises Unit allows a producer to insure all acres of the insured crop in the county together, as opposed to other unit structures that separate the acreage for insurance. Enterprise Units are attractive to producers due to lower premium rates offered to recognize the lower risk associated with the geographic diversification. In general, the larger the Enterprise Unit, the lesser the risk, and the greater the Enterprise Unit discount.

“Today’s expansion of the availability of Enterprise Units is in response to public feedback of producers needing more options to manage their risk,” said RMA Administrator Marcia Bunger. “When we see success with an update or expansion of a program, we naturally look to other risk management products to see if we can make similar improvements. Today’s announcement builds off the success we announced in July. It is critical that while we are examining our resources for areas of improvement and also listening to America’s agricultural producers to hear exactly what they need.”

The following crops will have Enterprise Units available beginning with the 2024 crop year:

– Buckwheat
– Cabbage*
– Extra Long Staple Cotton
– Flax
– Fresh Market Tomatoes* (insured under the Guaranteed Production Plan policy)
– Millet
– Mustard
– Processing Tomatoes* (excluding California)
– Safflower
– Sesame

*Specialty crop

This furthers RMA’s efforts to improve and expand the insurance program for specialty crops as required by the 2018 Farm Bill. RMA plans to expand to more specialty and other APH crop programs with these benefits next year.

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See the full press release here.