2019 is a year that most farmers would like to forget, the same goes for insurance agents that handle crop insurance.
But it’s a new year and Citizens National Bank and Williamson Insurance offered local farmers the chance to learn what 2020 could bring. With a rainy spring that lasted into summer, farmers took a hit on getting their crops into the fields. Williamson Insurance says just their crop insurance clients were paid out a total of 60 million dollars to make up for some of the losses in 2019. So they stressed the importance of checking to see what type of insurance plan is best for individuals’ farms. And in terms of grain prices, national agriculture experts say going into 2020 prices are not bad, but not good either.
“I tell everyone that we are in “No Man’s Land” with prices. Not good enough to make much money, but not good enough to trigger a lot of payments, so we are in the middle,” says Dr. Joe Outlaw, Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M. “The future looks like we are going to be flat, so people need to understand when they get marketing opportunities, grab them.”
Outlaw says that here in West Central Ohio we are in a better situation than most people are, and the future is bright for agriculture with President Trump securing positive trade deals for the agriculture industry.
