Chad Hart first contributed to the Iowa Ag Review in September 1995. In the article he examined the merits of revenue insurance as a replacement for yield insurance in the U.S. crop insurance program. His analysis appeared well before any revenue insurance program was available for sale.

The issue of disaster assistance for agriculture has been debated on and off for many years. In most years in the past decade, Congress provided ad hoc disaster assistance for various agricultural disasters across the country. The most recent packages have had a difficult time getting through Congress, as the president insisted on budget offsets to pay for them. A few key members of Congress pushed hard and were successful in including a permanent disaster program in the 2008 farm bill. The newly enacted legislation issues a fleet of disaster assistance programs for specialty crop, livestock, honeybee, and farm-raised fish and program crop disasters. The largest title covers program crops and is called the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Program (SURE).

ACRE, which is an acronym for Average Crop Revenue Election, is a new commodity program included in the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (the 2008 farm bill). Farmers can choose to participate in ACRE or they can continue to enroll in traditional commodity programs. ACRE is designed to provide revenue support to farmers as an alternative to the price support that farmers are used to receiving from commodity programs. Here, we answer some frequently asked questions about this new program.

The recent large increases in the prices of agricultural commodities have focused the world’s attention on the price and availability of food to an extent not seen for the last 30 years. The low prices that have been with us since the mid-1980s lulled most of us all into forgetting about the urgency of the task that the world faces in expanding agricultural production enough to meet projected food demand.