Crop Insurance Executive Kyle Jore: The Future of Crop Insurance May Be More Important Than Ever
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For farmers and ranchers, deciding to sell a piece of land is much more than a business decision, especially if the land has been in the family for generations. This isn’t just selling a piece of property.
Kyle Jore -- Head of Crop Insurance Development for agriculture consulting firm Watts and Associates -- knows that the current financial agricultural landscape will likely mean that additional family farmers will decide to sell off some or all their land because it makes the most business sense.
But that doesn't make it easy.
"That's a healthy economy to have that happen," Jore told American Farmland Owner from his office in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. "It's just culturally incredibly challenging."
Farmers selling part of their land
Those pressures become particularly acute when farm profitability gets squeezed, and land values begin to weaken. Jore said he has seen Minnesota farmers give up rental ground or sell parcels, sometimes choosing the pieces of land that are less productive or more difficult to manage.
And those decisions can carry consequences far beyond one farm.
Kyle Jore bio:
Watts and Associates – Economist, Head of Crop Insurance Development
Family farmer – Soybeans
University of Minnesota – Applied Economics Researcher and Instructor
Gustavus Adolphus College – Visiting Assistant Professor of Statistics
Bethany Lutheran College – Associate Professor of Mathematics
General NanoSystems -- Marketing Manager
Financial stress on farmers
Jore worries that the financial pressure facing farmers could eventually put crop insurance and other agricultural safety net programs under greater scrutiny at a time when producers may need them most.
"The big worry here is ... fear that farmers might at some point lose public sentiment," he said.
Support for crop insurance
That concern is significant because crop insurance has grown into one of the most important tools available to American farmers for managing risk. But its growing size also makes it more visible to policymakers and taxpayers.
"We've grown the pie so much in crop insurance that it didn't used to be something people thought about much," Jore said. "But I hate to say it, I think it's getting so big it's going to be hard to ignore."
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Importance of crop insurance
That puts an even greater premium on protecting the program's stability, he said.
A relatively small change in the perceived risk surrounding farmland can have an outsized impact because so much of a farmer's financial strength is tied to the value of the land he or she owns.
"A single basis point jump in the perceived risk of farmland could have dire consequences on the overall formula," Jore said.
The reason is straightforward: farmers can't simply keep raising rents or selling more crops to compensate for every increase in costs or decrease in land values.
Jore said. "Historically in agriculture, we just haven't seen us grow out, you know, price-wise, like we have in other sectors."
Access to capital
For farmers, the stakes extend to access to capital. Farm balance sheets are heavily dependent on land values, and a decline in those values can quickly affect a producer's ability to borrow money.
"Once you see a slight change in that, it's either stabilization or downtick, your ability to get capital and access to capital is greatly affected," Jore said.
That is one reason Jore believes the future of crop insurance needs to be viewed not simply as an agricultural policy question, but as part of the broader financial infrastructure supporting American agriculture.
He also sees an important test coming from the evolution of disaster assistance.
New crop insurance options
Jore said he is watching closely to see how newer insurance products perform in 2026, particularly area-based products such as Enhanced Coverage Option (ECO).
The larger goal, he said, is to determine whether private-sector insurance can eventually shoulder more of the burden that has traditionally fallen to ad hoc federal disaster programs.
"Can we cost share these disaster programs with the producer through private engagement?" Jore said. "Can we get that system running where we can kind of start to wean ourselves off again?"
Farmers’ belief in crop insurance
But that transition will depend on whether farmers believe the insurance products actually work when they need them.
That's not necessarily simple. A county-level loss doesn't always match the experience of an individual farm. A producer can suffer a significant loss while the county as a whole doesn't trigger the same level of protection.
"County-based losses are not your individual farm losses," Jore said. "So, how do those county yields shape out? What do we actually settle at? Where do our prices go? And then the bigger question, did it work for the grower?"
That may be the defining question for crop insurance in the years ahead.
