Most federal crop insurance is written one crop at a time, by county, with a yield history behind it. That works for 800 acres of corn. It does not work for a farm with thirty vegetable crops, a flock of layers, a dozen steers and a market stall, where the revenue comes from the whole mix and no single crop has a tidy county yield. For that kind of farm USDA offers two policies that insure the farm's revenue as a whole: Whole-Farm Revenue Protection (WFRP) and its smaller cousin, Micro Farm. A third program, NAP, sits with the Farm Service Agency and fits some farms better than either.
July is a good month to work through this. If you already hold a WFRP policy, your Revised Farm Operation Report is due July 15. If you do not, the next chance to buy is the sales closing date for the 2025 insurance year, which for late fiscal-year filers is November 20 and for everyone else falls between late January and mid April. RMA publishes any changes for the 2025 year by the contract change date at the end of August, so the terms below are the 2024 terms, and they are the ones to read now.
What WFRP actually insures
WFRP is one policy for all the commodities a farm produces, available in every county in the country, for farms with up to $17 million in insured revenue. It was written for farms that sell into direct, local and regional markets and grow specialty crops and livestock, which describes most of the farms we work with.
The amount you can insure is the lower of two numbers: the revenue you expect on this year's farm plan, or your five-year average historic income adjusted for growth. RMA calls the result your approved revenue. You then pick a coverage level from 50 to 85 percent in five percent steps. The arithmetic is simple: $200,000 of approved revenue at 75 percent coverage gives $150,000 of insured revenue. At the end of the year, after you file your taxes, an adjuster works out your revenue to count. If it falls below the insured revenue because of an insured cause of loss, you are paid the difference.
A few details matter more than they look. WFRP insures revenue produced during the insurance period, so a calf that weighed 800 pounds on the first day of the period and sells at 1,200 pounds counts for the 400 pounds it gained. Timber, forest products and animals for sport, show or pets are excluded. A farm with more than $2 million of expected revenue from animals and animal products is not eligible, and the same $2 million limit applies to nursery and greenhouse products. Replant coverage is included for annual crops other than hemp. All of this is spelled out in RMA's 2024 WFRP questions and answers, which is the plainest official document on the policy.
What WFRP is not: it is not liability cover, not property cover and not health cover. Our older piece on what types of insurance a farmer needs covers that side.
Diversification is the whole point
The policy rewards a mixed farm, and it does so through a number called the commodity count. This is not a tally of what you grow. It is a measure of how evenly your revenue is spread. A farm with 95 percent of its revenue in apples and 5 percent in pears counts as one commodity. Shift that to 80 and 20 and it counts as two. The rule is that a commodity has to contribute at least a third of the evenly distributed share to count on its own; small commodities below the line are grouped together, which pushes the count up rather than down.
The count drives two things. Farms with two or more commodities get a premium rate discount that grows with diversification. They also get the whole-farm premium subsidy instead of the lower enterprise subsidy. Under the 2024 terms the government pays 80 percent of the premium at every coverage level up to 75 percent for a farm with two or more commodities, 71 percent at 80 percent coverage and 56 percent at 85 percent. A single-commodity farm gets 77, 68 and 53 percent at those top three levels. In plain terms, a diversified farm at 75 percent coverage pays one fifth of the premium.
This is the financial case for what we have argued for years from the agronomic side, in the dangers of monocropping and how to diversify farming income. A farm that manages holistically spreads its risk across enterprises anyway. WFRP simply prices that.
The records you will need
WFRP runs on your tax returns. The standard requirement is five years of Schedule F forms. If you file a different farm tax form, you and your agent complete a Substitute Schedule F from your records. Beginning and veteran farmers can qualify with three consecutive years of farm tax forms (four if they qualified as beginning farmers the year before) as long as they farmed last year, and someone who takes over at least 90 percent of an existing operation may be able to use the previous operator's history, with the insurer's approval. Two narrower exceptions exist, for a farmer who was physically unable to farm in one of the five years and for tax-exempt entities such as Tribal entities with third-party records. Beyond those, there is no way around the five-year rule.
You also need a farm plan for the insurance year listing each commodity, the acres or head, the expected yield and the expected price. The plan goes on the Farm Operation Report, which has three sections. The Intended section sets your premium. The Revised section, due July 15, records what you actually planted or stocked. The Final section closes the year and must be in before the next sales closing date; miss it and you are limited to 65 percent coverage the following year.
For direct marketers the records burden is lighter than people fear. Farm marketing records kept during the sales year are acceptable, and RMA posts recordkeeping aids on its WFRP page for exactly this. What the insurer needs is a complete sales record by commodity and verifiable acreage. If you have been putting off a proper bookkeeping system, our guide to Schedule F and farm taxes is the place to start, and the habit of consistency in the record book is what makes a claim go smoothly.
One rule trips up value-added farms. Market readiness costs, meaning the minimum work to get a crop out of the field and saleable, such as washing and packing done at or near the field, stay in your insured revenue. Anything that changes the form of the product or adds value, such as pressing cider, making jam or assembling gift baskets, is removed from the revenue WFRP covers. If much of your income comes from a kitchen rather than a field, that matters, and it is one reason Micro Farm exists.
Micro Farm: the simpler version for farms under $350,000
Micro Farm is a variation of WFRP for farms with approved revenue of up to $350,000 in the first year, or $400,000 for a carryover insured who held a Micro Farm policy the year before. The ceiling was more than tripled to $350,000 in the changes RMA announced in late 2022, which brought many small direct-market farms inside it. A farm cannot have more than half of its revenue from commodities bought for resale.
Three things make it simpler, according to RMA's 2024 Micro Farm questions and answers. First, it needs three years of Schedule F history rather than five. Second, commodities are not priced one by one; a single value for the whole farm is set from the average allowable revenue of the previous three to five years, so you are not hunting for a county price for garlic scapes. Third, post-production activities such as canning, freezing and processing can stay in your allowable revenue, which is the opposite of the WFRP rule above. Revenue from things that are not agricultural commodities, such as souvenirs, still comes out.
The trade-offs are small but real. Micro Farm has no replant coverage. The subsidy table is the same as the whole-farm table above, 80 percent up to 75 percent coverage, then 71 and 56 percent. Coverage levels run from 50 to 85 percent. You can still buy an individual crop policy for a commodity on the side, and a NAP payment that exceeds your Micro Farm deductible counts as revenue at claim time, so the programs do not pay twice for the same loss.
For a farm that fits the ceiling, Micro Farm is usually the right first policy. It is the kind of simplification we try to find everywhere: the same protection with fewer worksheets. That is what always simplify looks like in an insurance office.
Sales closing dates and the calendar
Both policies follow your tax year, and the deadline to buy depends on how you file. For calendar-year filers and fiscal years starting August 1 or earlier, WFRP's sales closing date is January 31, February 28 or March 15, depending on the county. Micro Farm's dates are a month later in each case: February 28, March 31 or April 15. For fiscal years starting September 1 or later, both policies close on November 20 of the year before the fiscal year begins. Your county's date is in RMA's Actuarial Information Browser, or an agent will tell you.
For a first-year insured, coverage begins on the later of the first day of the insurance period or ten days after the insurer accepts the application, so do not leave the paperwork to the closing date itself. Policies are sold by private crop insurance agents working for approved insurance providers, and RMA's agent locator lists them by state. Not every agent writes WFRP regularly. Ask how many whole-farm policies the office holds before you commit to one.
There is also a quiet July deadline worth knowing. If you grow something that is not on your county's WFRP commodity list, you can insure it this year under an "other" code, but to get it listed for next year your agent needs to tell the RMA regional office around mid July, ahead of the end-of-August contract change date. Put it on the same list as your winter planning tasks, because by the time you sit down with the seed catalogs the window has closed.
Beginning and veteran farmers should also ask their agent about RMA's benefits for beginning farmers and veterans, which make federal crop insurance more affordable in the first years of a farm.
When NAP is the better fit
The Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program is run by the Farm Service Agency, not RMA, and it covers crops for which federal crop insurance is not available: fruits and vegetables without a policy in your county, floriculture, mushrooms, honey, maple sap and others. The FSA program page gives the basics. Catastrophic coverage pays on losses beyond 50 percent of your approved yield at 55 percent of the average market price. Buy-up coverage goes to 65 percent of yield at 100 percent of price.
The cost is a service fee of $325 per crop per county, capped at $825 per producer per county and $1,950 for a producer in several counties. Buy-up coverage adds a premium set by regulation at 5.25 percent of the value you insure, which is your share times acres times approved yield times coverage level times average market price, with the premium capped at 5.25 percent of the payment limit. Beginning, limited resource, socially disadvantaged and veteran farmers who certify their status get the service fee waived and a 50 percent premium reduction. Application closing dates are set crop by crop, so ask your county office early.
NAP is the better fit in three situations. The first is a new farm without three years of Schedule F, which cannot buy Micro Farm unless it took over an existing operation. The second is a farm with one dominant crop, where the whole-farm commodity count would be one and the subsidy advantage disappears. The third is a very small farm where a few hundred dollars in service fees, possibly waived, is easier to budget than a whole-farm premium. NAP is also a yield program rather than a revenue program, so it pays on a crop that fails even in a year when the rest of the farm did fine, which WFRP does not. The two can be held together, and the people who handle NAP are the same county office that handles FSA microloans and beginning farmer loans, so one visit covers both.
A practical close
Insurance is a long-game decision, not a last-week-of-February one. Here is the sequence we suggest for a diversified farm this summer.
- Pull your last five Schedule F forms, or three if you are under $350,000. If you have fewer, note the year you will qualify and plan around NAP until then.
- Draft next year's farm plan now, by commodity, with acres, expected yield and expected price. You need it for the application anyway, and it tells you your commodity count.
- Run the count. The test is whether each commodity reaches a third of an even split, so with two crops the smaller one needs at least a sixth of revenue; that is why 80 and 20 counts as two commodities and 95 and 5 as one. If your second enterprise sits well below that line, the subsidy drops, and that may be a reason to grow the second enterprise rather than the first.
- Find two agents through the locator and ask each how many WFRP or Micro Farm policies they service. Late fiscal-year filers need an application in before November 20; everyone else has until late winter, but the first-year ten-day rule means early is better.
- Visit the FSA county office in the same month and ask which of your crops are NAP-eligible and whether your fee is waived.
- Keep sales records by commodity every week from now on. The recordkeeping aids on RMA's WFRP page are free and fit on a clipboard.
Whole-farm insurance will not make a thin margin thick. What it does is let a farm that has spread its risk across many enterprises carry a bad year without selling land or livestock, which is the point of thinking long-term. The agents, insurers and organizations that work on this are in our service providers directory and our organizations directory. Program terms change with each Farm Bill and each August contract change date; our Farm Bill explainer describes how those changes come about.