Insurance for draft-powered farms

[daniel grover]

Hello everyone,

I’m curious if you can weigh in on securing insurance for your horse/oxen powered business. How do folks approach insurance companies? Do you just talk about having horses and cows or do you explicitly talk about using draft power as traction? Or do you just look for regular farm insurance and not mention draft power at all? Has anyone had trouble getting their farm insured because they use draft animals?

Any recommendations on the topic are welcome!

[dominiquer60]

We use Farm Family. I think the only difference from a regular farm policy is that we have the horses covered on-farm in case anyone gets hurt, I don’t think it matters that they work or not, just that you have them and your butt is covered if something freakish happened. If you talk to a regular farm insurance firm, they should know how to handle horses, the non- farm groups start to through weird policies your way because they don’t know how to handle them.

Erika

[daniel grover]

Thanks, Erika! And do they cover the dairy side of your operation too?

[LongViewFarm]

We have an extensive corporate policy after incorporating as a business. Concord group bundles all our insurance (we are in NH) and though they are wicked expensive we are well covered for liability on and off farm for all activities we and our agent could dream up.
I also carry a personal umbrella policy that covers for anything (farm related or not) not covered by other policies, and covers if any claim payout is greater than other coverages.
It’s a lot, and expensive, but seems complete.

[JaredWoodcock]

We use farm family. We were referred to them by someone from Roxbury farm. We do on site poultry processing so they didnt even think twice about the horses. We dont have anything in our policy that covers the horses or equipment, just basic liability. I am not a fan of the insurance industry as a whole so I keep my policy to a bare minimum. It costs us around $1200 per year. If we were going to do sleigh rides or anything like that our agent wants us to add another layer but it wouldnt cost much.

From my impression they prefer that you have tractors solely on the fact that they can charge you for a much larger policy….

[dominiquer60]

Yes, They covered the dairy, now beef, ice cream, sugarhouse, Sam’s building business and timber harvest, off farm hay rides, DAPNet plow clinics, vegetables etc. The horses are under the main farm policy and are covered in case some moron goes into the pasture and gets hurt, but also covers on-farm hay rides, and when they are at competitions. If we do off farm rides, that is a whole other ball of pricey wax, so we dropped that because we don’t do enough to cover the insurance.

Erika

[JaredWoodcock]

I just saw this article this morning, https://www.morningagclips.com/inherent-risk-reform-to-benefit-agritourism/

It is an attempt to mitigate some of the issues… Not sure if it will work or not.

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