Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Fancy Finance, Down on the Farm

From Farm Futures:

John Deere Risk Protection is offering the industry's first-ever Ethanol Policy. It provides coverage to corn producers, who have delivery contracts for the purpose of ethanol production. This new policy insures yield shortfalls below contracted volumes in the event the price to replace the corn rises above the federal crop insurance coverage.

Farmers are eligible to buy ethanol coverage once they have multi-peril crop insurance policies including Crop Revenue Coverage and Revenue Assurance with the harvest price option in place with JDRP.

In a nutshell the ethanol policy pays an indemnity if:

* A farmer's corn production comes up short of the number of bushels he's forward contracted to an ethanol plant

* And the price to buy replacement bushels is higher than all three of: the price at which the farmer contracted with the ethanol plant; the spring crop insurance price and the fall crop insurance price....MORE