TUNIS MILLS — As veteran farmer Mike Mielke watched a young buck bound out of his very dry corn field on Marengo Road, he shouted, “take it all. It is the insurance company’s now.”
Due to lack of rain, his 1,400 acres are “fired up from the bottom.” The feet of the feed corn stalks are yellow, and the leaves are trying to preserve moisture by rolling up.
Mielke thinks a lot of Delmarva farmers are in the same predicament — super low bushel-per-acre yields due to lack of rain.
“This spot where we are has had about half an inch of rain over the last six weeks,” he said. “A lot of my other corn has had two to three inches total for that period, but that is nowhere (near) enough to grow a good crop and is already at or below the insurance coverage.”
Following the passage of the Federal Crop Insurance Reform and Department of Agriculture Reauthorization Act of 1994, farmers are required to have crop insurance. They can get coverage for up to 85% of their average yield and must have coverage for a minimum of 50%.
Mielke got 80% coverage, and though he won’t make any money off of this crop, the insurance money, he said, will cover him.
For Mielke, his insurance guarantees him 130 bushels per acre at $4.66. This does not cover all his expenses and land rent. It makes it a smaller loss.
“Yesterday was the first time I got out my insurance papers and started looking at these numbers. After 50 years of farming, you just have a sense of where your corn is,” he said. “The yield has been reduced by this drought.”
Kim James, who sells crop insurance for Schauber-Van Schaik in Easton said early claims are already filing in from Talbot County farmers.
Though there is still time for actual payouts to occur, she has seen about a dozen claims so far. In a normal, rainy season there are no claims, she said.
James said farmers have a 72-hour window to make a claim after seeing damage to their crop. To be safe, she said, many will make claims that can be withdrawn later if the crop improves.
“They put the claim in if they notice there is some damage. At this point, we don’t have anybody that is destroying fields of corn. Most of them have the intention to take their grain to harvest,” James said. “We have had 10 or 12 in the general Talbot County area that are starting early claims. We are all praying for rain. Corn is pretty hurt in this area.”
Shannon Dill, principal agent at the University of Maryland College of University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said “it has been a long time since it has been this dry. We have had droughts in the past, but it is extremely dry. Corn has one opportunity to make an ear. Once that opportunity is missed, like in a drought, it can affect the formation of the ear and the kernels. Therefore it really does cause problems with yield. We are definitely struggling with the corn crop.”
While Mielke said his business will survive, he expressed concern for younger farmers with a lot of debt, for whom, he said, the hot and dry conditions will be more difficult to weather.
“For farmers, you don’t want to have a really bad year. That is the whole idea (of crop insurance), to avoid a devastating year,” Mielke said. “There is going to be some pain around here, especially for the younger ones who are highly leveraged. This is some of the worst we have seen for corn.”
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