Finstad, USDA administrator join local farmers to hear about crop insurance

Crop insurance has continued to provide farmers an unseen and hard-to-measure benefit, according to local farmer, agriculture advocate and agriculture teacher at South Central College Jeff Schultz. That benefit? A sense of security and relief on the mental health of farmers and their families.

Schultz was among one of about a dozen area farmers, crop-insurance agents and policy advocates who met with U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad and United States Department of Agriculture Risk Management Agency Administrator Pat Swanson to talk about crop insurance, recent changes to the program and offer suggestions for the program at the Faribault Area Chamber of Commerce & Tourism Friday afternoon.

The meeting followed changes to the crop-insurance program made in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, widely known as the One Big Beautiful Bill. Attendees were especially grateful to the congressman for the bill he introduced, the Federal Agriculture Risk Management Enhancement and Resilience (FARMER) Act, which he said was added into the omnibus bill signed by President Trump in July 2025.

Namely, the act lowered costs and barriers for farmers to access crop insurance. It even added programs for new and emerging farmers. Minnesota Farm Service Agency Executive Director Kurt Blomgren described the overall purpose of crop insurance from his perspective.

"In regards to crop insurance as a farmer, that allows us to sleep at night," he said. "The tools we have now, comparatively to when I began farming, it's kind of high-stakes poker now. With farming, the input costs and the risk we have with all of it, we all understand that, but (crop insurance) just makes it relaxing."

Finstad said it's no different than car insurance.

"Farmers don't want to use crop insurance," he said. "We just want to be able to sleep at night."

The discussion focused on niche issues with crop insurance and farming, which seemed helpful for Finstad and Swanson.

After the meeting, Finstad told the Daily News the key takeaway from the meeting for him.

"Today, for me, was to get a good pulse," he said. "'How's the insurance products that we have? Are they working? Are they not? Where are there tweaks that we can find?' And we heard a couple of those in there, and they're very nuanced tweaks. But that's the hard work of legislating. It's not all politically sexy, and it's not always easy to dumb down into a political slogan, right? That's real work of trying to do really good policy."

Farmers brought up multiple issues they still have through the program, however, including moving the billing date permanently to Sept. 30 to align with grain sales, scaling the $200,000 claim audit threshold relative to policy size rather than a universal cap, regionalizing production reporting and plant dates to reflect actual growing conditions rather than rigid county or soil boundaries, expanding enterprise categories by type for corn and soybean silage and allowing for broader access to the product-to-yield program for diverse crop rotations.

In line to the first point, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced at Minnesota FarmFest last month that there would be a temporary 60-day extension to the billing date for crop insurance claims. Crop insurance agent, farmer and member of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association Rob Tate asked Swanson and Finstad about the matter.

"What's it going to take to get that permanent?" Tate asked. "If not 60 days, at least 30 days or something. But as you look at producers in Minnesota and the cash flow of it all, Sept. 30 bill date gets to be a little bit off the cash flow. If we could even get that pushed back a month, it would be very helpful. Certainly, 60 days would be much more helpful."

Swanson said it might be easier than expected, and Minn-Iowa Crop Insurance President Travis Keister said that it hadn't been changed in 20 years but has been changed four times in the past six years. Keister said Oct. 30 was a much better date for farmers than Sept. 30.

"The reason that I think Oct. 30 worked so well is because, No. 1, farmers were able to write that check with potentially some of the grain sales that came off the field and crops," Keister said. "It also worked well for the industry because it gives time to turn around and pay commissions, and it could take 30 days to get that done."

Schultz added to that sentiment.

"That is the tightest time of the year in the cash flow," he said. "I've had students that have gotten penalties because it's like 'Well, the deadline always used to be this, so that's when I planned on paying it. But it got switched.' Because you don't check that."

Finstad said he was going to "get to the bottom of" the billing date.

"That is just purely inside government, moving the money from one fiscal year to the next," he said. "That's a paper move that former administrations have used. But what we heard here is the reality is it affects the farmers in the timing of when they have to (pay premiums). And so I'm going to go back and try to figure out."

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