The USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA), on a weekly basis, updates the Federal Crop Insurance Crop data on its web site http://www.rma.usda.gov/. From the website, one can obtain county level data by crop, coverage level (since 1999), insurance plan, and delivery method. The data contains the number of policies sold, policies earning a premiums, policies indemnified, units earning a premium, units indemnified, and net acres. In addition, the data contains in dollars the total liabilities, total premium paid to insurance companies, the premium amounts paid by state and government (subsidies, premium discounts and cost shares), and indemnities paid to farmers. Loss ratios are calculated. The user can select to create summary data by state, crop, or insurance plan. The user selects to output the summary data on the screen, as a document for printing, or as an Excel spreadsheet file.

A major limitation of the data set is that each summary report covers only one year. To obtain all data (1989 to 2005), one must create seventeen individual reports. In addition, county level summaries are limited to one state and one year. To obtain the data for all counties and all years would require 850 downloads. RMA updates the nearby years weekly. For example, county level data for cotton requires separate downloads for each cotton state for each year.

As an alternative, one can download a zipped file that contains annual data files since 1995. Each annual data file is a non-delimited ASCII text file with data for all states, all counties, and all crops. To create a data set for all years since 1995, the annual data files must be combined and the numerous changes in crop/ insurance plan codes and data formats must be corrected.

To overcome these problems with obtaining multi-year data for all crop insurance data since 1995, a SAS program was written to combine the annual data files downloaded from the RMA web site into one file. The SAS program standardizes the data formats across years and corrects for changes in crop and insurance plan codes.

Within the SAS program, one can create multi-year county level data sets by state, crop, insurance plan, or other variables. The multi-year summary data can be exported as text, database or spreadsheet formats.

The authors use the Excel Pivot Table Chart feature to demonstrate how farmer paid premiums, total premiums and indemnities paid to cotton farmers varies across states, production regions, insurance plans (APH, CRC, GRP and IP)and coverage level.

Cotton producers will be able to access the multi-year, county level data at the Texas Cooperative Extension cotton marketing website.