2026 marks the 20^th anniversary year in where the Pasture, Rangeland, Forage has been offered, at least to some producers. Briefly, PRF was first offered in 2007 as a pilot program. Initially available to a limited number of counties, the program was designed to provide coverage for rainfall shortages, with the program expanding significantly over the following years. It was fully available in the contiguous 48 states by 2016. Furthermore, PRF was established as a rainfall index policy that utilizes rainfall data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). There are no claims, no deductible. You set your coverage level, your productivity level and you are all set.

It is also important to note that The PRF rates are calculated by using NOAA rainfall data going back to 1949. That means that the Risk Management Agency (RMA) has 78 years of data to use to set a rate that should be actuarily sound for all parts of the country, especially with a federally subsidized policy like PRF.

So, what does all of this actually mean to you? Well, it should depend upon where you ranch. For instance, if you ranch in a part of the country where the data shows a higher frequency of falling below the coverage level and/or the severity of loss, it would stand to reason that your rates would be set higher than areas of the country where there is less frequency of loss and the severity of loss isn’t as pronounced.

Let’s take for a moment your homeowner’s policy. If you live in a part of the state where there is a higher probability of hailstorms, tornadoes or hurricanes, wouldn’t it stand to reason that your insurance rates would be higher than areas where these perils are less likely to occur? That makes sense to me.

Now let’s go back to PRF. The problem we are seeing now is that we have insurance providers either pulling out of Texas, telling us not sign up any new business, or offering us, as agents, a substantially reduced commission rate. All the while, RMA continues to increase our workload on each policy by adding new regulations that mimic those of our counterpart, the Farm Service Agency (FSA). For the first time in 20 years, the RMA now requires us to obtain all lease agreements on all leased land, just as the FSA has required for many years. The difference?

The major difference is this. When you go to your local FSA office and provide either proof of ownership and/or copes or current lease agreements, the FSA assigns unique Farm, Tract and Field Number to those properties. So, when you add a state code and county code to each one of the fields, we end up with a unique ID for that particular field. Your insurance agent cannot assign those numbers to you.

Yet your agent is asked to provide the RMA with redundant information that the FSA office was already tasked to do. In the early days of PRF, we were not required to provide Farm numbers. We had to provide Point of References (POR’s). These POR’s provided a longitude, latitiude point on each property insured. As time went on, it was decided that providing the Farm, Tract and field numbers was indeed a point of reference because each one has a unique ID. Hear me on this—each Farm, Tract and Field number assigned by the FSA is unique to any other acre in the contiguous United States. You can have more than one Farm1, Tract 1 and Field 1 in Madison County—but not in Madison County, Texas. There likely are other Madison Counties in the United States. But there is never more than one Madison county in any given state. Therefore, when you have an acre, or part of an acre, assigned a State code, County code, Farm, Tract, Field number by the FSA, you have the most accurate point of reference you can have.

Additional POR’s are not needed and prove time consuming and troublesome. And now we are being required to gather current lease agreements as well. Even when we cannot provide the producer the FSA Farm numbers needed.

Currently, If you are a producer in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico or Florida, you should be concerned. Significant changes to PRF rates have not been seen for quite some time. Yet all of a sudden, we have insurance providers suggesting to us that these areas may not me actuarily sound. And for a state as vast as Texas, where the annual yearly rainfall averages from 8 inches to over 50 inches—NOT ALL LOSSES ARE THE SAME! 

The Southern states are going through a prolonged drought. And you the producer ranching in those states will suffer because the RMA hasn’t seen fit to change the rates in areas where needed.

I’ll have more thoughts on this issue in the coming months. Please stay tuned.