Michigan is launching what officials said is the nation's first public-private crop insurance program for regenerative farming.
Regenerative farming is the practice of creating healthier soil with cover crops, natural fertilizers, no-till planting, livestock grazing, and crop diversity. The goal is improving soil so it retains water and nutrients, saves money on chemical fertilizers, increases crop yields, and reduces the risk of crop losses.
Tim Boring is director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
He says gardeners who have worked over time to enrich their home garden soil understand what healthy soil looks like — it has a crumbly, almost 'chocolate cake' kind of texture and appearance. And it's the same thing for agricultural land, just on a larger scale.
"When a soil's more alive, and we have a thriving biological environment, with more organic material and microbes in the soil, it can provide a positive place for crop development and ultimately higher crop yield," he said.
Boring said the state pilot will enroll about 80 farmers in Michigan's Thumb region. Crop insurance companies will use the state's field-by-field AI analysis of existing databases, along with collecting physical soil samples throughout the year, to set a lower insurance price for the enrolled farmers, because of the lower risk of crop failure.
Boring said the state has big ambitions for the program, national as well as statewide.
"Crop insurance is highly (federally) subsidized," Boring said. "So there's a lot of taxpayer implications. It's going to be prohibitively expensive moving forward to continue our current approaches of ensuring risk and revenue protection for farmers, and addressing the pretty dire economic situations we have as farmers. So efforts like this could eventually inform a U.S. Farm Bill in the future."
