“To amend the Federal Crop Insurance Act to improve education and risk management assistance, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section revises the Partnerships for Risk Management Education program (i.e., competitive grants through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to public and private entities for educating agricultural producers on risk management strategies such as crop insurance and farm financial benchmarking) as follows: (1) in subsection (a)(2)(A), expands grant purposes to include technical assistance to approved crop insurance providers, including language translation services as appropriate; (2) in subsection (a)(3), adds "outreach, and language translation" to required emphases and inserts a new target group of federal crop insurance providers (especially for the whole-farm diversified risk management insurance plan under section 522(c)(7)), redesignating former subparagraph (F) as (G); and (3) in subsection (a)(4), updates cross-references accordingly. The section further revises assistance for risk management under subsection (b) by (1) expanding priority activities in paragraph (2)(C) to include areawide integrated pest management, soil health improvements, sustainable water sources and irrigation, perennial crop establishment (including agroforestry), livestock integration, aerobic composting of waste, and other practices to reduce climate-related financial risk; (2) adding paragraph (2)(D) for mitigating financial risk through production or marketing diversification (e.g., value-added processing, market infrastructure such as drying and storage facilities, organic farming, and food safety certification); (3) increasing the payment limitation in paragraph (3) to $200,000 for any 5-year period (from $50,000 for any year) and excluding other federal funds from the limit; and (4) in paragraph (4)(B), increasing available funding to $30 million (from $10 million), striking former clause (ii), and restructuring text. The section also authorizes $20 million for FY2026 and each fiscal year thereafter to carry out the section, to remain available until expended.