WEATHER Act Aims to Reduce Hurdles for Small Farmers

In December, a group of legislators, including Vermont U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, pitched the Withstanding Extreme Agricultural Threats by Harvesting Economic Resilience (WEATHER) Act, legislation calling for developing an index-based insurance policy that is more responsive to crop and income losses caused by extreme weather.

The program would create a multi-peril index insurance product for farmers based on weather indices correlated to agricultural income losses using data from NOAA, satellites, climate models and other data sources.

The legislation directs the USDA to research developing an insurance program with payouts based on agricultural income. This is particularly important to the approximately 8% of U.S. farms (American Farm Bureau Federation) that market foods locally through direct-to-consumer or intermediated sales, which would be covered and reimbursed for retail rather than wholesale value on losses.

Farmers would automatically be reimbursed within 30 days if an extreme weather event exceeds any pre-determined county-level threshold. The new system would ease the administrative burden on farmers, which can unfairly impact family-run diversified farms.