Crop insurance claims already increasing in Canada

Crop Insurance

As another summer comes with devastating flooding, farmers are already contacting their insurers.

As farmers begin to have the opportunity to see how much of their land has been affected by flooding in Saskatchewan, Canada, they are submitting their crop insurance claims on an increasing basis.

It is believed that the full impact of the flooding throughout Saskatchewan will not be known until the fall.

According to Rae Groeneveld, from the Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation, by July 29, there had already been 792 claims submitted, pre-harvest. He explained that “A good majority of those claims are as the result of the flooding.” It is also believed that this isn’t nearly the final total that will be seen for the season, as the claims continue to come in as a result of the wide reaching floodwaters throughout the province.

The areas where the most crop insurance claims are expected to occur are in the southeast and east-central regions.

Crop InsuranceIt was in those parts of the province that they were the hardest hit by the flooding, this year. According to Groeneveld, “Producers, at least initially, wanted to give that crop some time to see just how much was damaged as a result of flooding; give that crop some time to see what recovered, what was damaged.”

That said, he also stated that it has reached the point that the farmers are better able to determine what has and what has not survived the floodwaters, so the assessments are beginning. As a result of that, the growers are capable of submitting their initial claims so that they will be able to get the ball rolling in the process with their insurers.

That said, the crop insurance industry isn’t anywhere near ready to be able to accurately predict what the total damage will have been for producers. Groeneveld explained that it won’t really be until this fall’s harvest that those numbers will actually become available. The reason is that everything at the moment is simply being tallied in the form of predictions. It is only at the harvest time that the claims will be finalized and that the industry will have an actual hold on the true impact that the floodwaters from late June and early July had on the plants.

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