Farmers may lose millions of dollars in insurance payments for their sprout-damaged wheat because of widespread mistakes in sampling their crop at Kansas grain elevators, state officials said. Kansas Agriculture Secretary Adrian Polansky, in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, said sprout damage may have caused a loss of more than $15 million in the 2004 Kansas wheat crop.
Most of those losses occurred in hard-hit northwest Kansas—where years of drought were followed this growing season by late-spring freezes and harvest-time rains. The little wheat left to harvest was then damaged by sprouting from the untimely moisture. But elevators throughout the region—unused to dealing with the sprout damage in usually arid western Kansas—combined samples from truckloads to create composite samples for fields in an effort to save time and money on tests during the harvest, Polansky said.
Many elevators were unaware the Agriculture Department’s Risk Management Agency required individual truckload samples for crop quality claims, and immediately changed procedures when they were informed, he said.
“What is frustrating is that this is real damage. It is documented. It is not an issue that challenges the integrity of crop insurance,” Polansky said Tuesday. “We are not talking about grain that didn’t get tested. We are talking about real sampling, real tests, real numbers. We are just debating the sampling protocol.”
The problem affects at least 2,000 Kansas farmers, and probably more, in a region that ranges from Colby to Garden City and west-central Kansas, Polansky said.
“We are talking about an area that has been through such a difficult time (farmers) need every dollar they can receive to stay in business,” he said.
RMA spokeswoman Shirley Pugh said the agency is trying to be as responsive as it can to the problem.
“We understand this is a very top-of-the-mind issue right now and we are open to methods that would allow us to keep the program integrity element alive and help the farmers out of the situation they are in,” Pugh said. Pugh said “program integrity” means keeping it as an insurance program and not a grant program that gives money away.
Among those affected is Tim Peterson, a fourth-generation farmer who cultivates 2,800 acres near Monument in northwest Kansas. He put 800 acres into hard white winter wheat—and the wheat he cut out of those acres had 80 to 90 percent sprout damage. Peterson had harvested a full day before word got out of the sampling problem. He figured the five truckloads of wheat that were improperly sampled cost him about $6,500 in insurance payments. But many of his farming neighbors lost tens of thousands of dollars more, he said.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Agribusiness Kansas
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