Improving Risk Management for Agriculture Producers

Current business risk management (BRM) programs are not meeting the evolving needs of agriculture. Producers face increasing volatility, while gaps in program design, delivery, and education continue to limit participation and effectiveness.

Canadian agriculture is becoming increasingly exposed to risk. Fewer than 1.37 percent of Canadians are farm operators, yet farms are larger, more complex, and carry substantially higher per-acre and per-animal financial exposure than in past decades. Rising input costs, labour shortages, climate-driven variability, and market disruptions have significantly increased the dollar value of risk producers must manage.

The Alberta Chambers of Commerce recommends that the Government of Alberta and the Government of Canada:

1. Place higher priority and increased funding on crop and livestock insurance programs, with specific emphasis on climate-resilient program design and enhanced coverage options for extreme weather events.
2. Raise the AgriStability reference margin trigger point to 85% and implement a 10 year median average option to better reflect long-term production patterns and reduce program volatility.
3. Include the ability for farmers to adjust inventory within AgriStability to better reflect actual farm operations and cash flow management.
4. Develop enhanced livestock risk management programs, including the opportunity for producers to lock in ceiling prices when purchasing livestock to manage market volatility throughout the ownership period.
5. Require crop insurance data delivery by Q4 of the previous year to enable producers to incorporate insurance information into their annual crop planning and farm business decisions.
6. Provide more easily accessible, publicly available and tailored education tools for the creation of risk management strategies through options such as workshops, webinars and online sessions.
7. Allow producers to separate enterprises between cow-calf and crop operations without establishing separate businesses, utilizing existing enterprise accounting systems for improved administrative efficiency and accurate financial reporting.
8. Support mixed operations with a unified farm-level risk-management toolkit for mixed operations that combines crop and livestock risk assessment tools, providing comprehensive farm-level risk management planning capabilities.
9. Remove the premium tax on private insurance to create a level playing field in risk management options and encourage optimal coverage selection.
10. Provide better response time in assessments, claims and processing through service level agreements, ensuring adequate staffing levels and contracting third-party adjusters and verifiers where needed.
11. Continue ongoing consultations with industry and stakeholder organizations to determine improvements and solutions for all agriculture risk management options to identify barriers, streamline delivery and ensure equitable coverage across all producer types and farm sizes, including options for new cropping and diversification opportunities and sustainable agriculture practices.