The One Big Beautiful BIll includes a premium subsidy increase for crop insurance. NDSU Senior Research Economist Dylan Turner says farmers have waited a long time to see a rate adjustment like this. “If you’re under an enterprise unit, you have to go back to 2008 and 2009 to see the last premium subsidy increase,” said Turner. “For those other unit structures, you have to go back all the way to 2000 for the last time those were adjusted so, for a lot of farmers, it will be the first time in 25 years that they’ve seen higher premium subsidy rates.” With basic and optional units, farmers typically take on more risk. The question remains whether these changes will impact farmers’ decisions to change their policies in the future. “What will be interesting is to see if that prompts farmers to switch from the enterprise to the basic unit. In North Dakota in particular, there tends to be more acreage under those enterprise units than basic and optional compared to the rest of the U.S. You take on a little bit more risk, but the subsidy level is higher than it was in the past.”
