Purdue Says Take a Close Look at Prevent Plant Option

Purdue-says-look-at-prevented-plant

Indiana corn and soybean planting delays continue in much of the state, and with the crop insurance final planting date now in the rear-view mirror, what are farmers’ options or alternatives? Purdue ag economists Jim Mintert and Michael Langemeier explore the possibilities in a new video available online. Mintert notes their work comes in a very, very unique year for farmers.

“We’ve never had this combination of extreme weather that’s pushed planting this late in the season, combined with the availability of crop insurance, in particular the availability of the prevented planting option in crop insurance,” Mintert told HAT. “As a result, we don’t really have any history of how farmers are going to respond to this.”

In the video the economists run the numbers, and their data suggests producers should run their own prevented planting numbers and seriously consider it.

“Have you really thought about what you would get on prevented planting vs. continuing to plant corn vs. switching over to soybeans? That’s really what we tried to do, and you can take what we did and adapt it to your situation because your yield number is probably different, your APH number is probably different. The coverage level that you have might be different. You need to do your own analysis but what we did in the video is lay out a template and if you differ a little bit from what we assume you can easily plug and chug the numbers on your own. But, the conclusion is prevented planting in many cases is a very good alternative.”

As Mintert mentioned, Purdue provides a copy of the slides they used so farmers can adapt the analysis for their situation. Mintert is the director of the Center for Commercial Agriculture. The video is on their website at the Archived Webinars page. Other timely webinars are now available with corn specialist Bob Nielsen, soybean specialist Shaun Casteel and weed scientist, Bill Johnson.