(NAFB) – Farmers have until Monday of next week to make crop insurance decisions.

It’s been several years since the spring crop insurance price has been this high. The average price for December corn futures last month was $4.58 a bushel and it was $11.87 for November soybeans. Those are the starting prices for crop insurance and they’re good ones says University of Minnesota’s Ed Usset.

Work from the University of Illinois agrees with that assessment and it has  Gary Schnitkey advising farmers to take the highest RP policies they’re comfortable with and to use ECO, too, if they are willing to pay the premium. So, for highly productive soils 80 or 85 percent RP plus ECO to 90 percent because he says it is worth it.

Farmers on less productive soils say those in parts of southern Illinois or in the far western corn belt may have tougher decisions to make as it is related to ECO even if they’re inclined to stay the course on the RP policies. At least that’s how Dan O’Brien from Kansas State sees it.

For those wanting to see how different coverage levels and options might work on their farms, the University of Illinois has a downloadable crop insurance decision tool. It is an Excel spreadsheet. Just type “crop insurance decision tool” into Google. It should be the first thing to pop up from the farmdoc website.