The 62nd annual meeting of the Crop Insurance and Reinsurance Bureau (CIRB) wrapped up last week in Indian Wells, California and concluded Lindsay Rinkenberger’s term as chair of the organization.
Rinkenberger, who is director of Commercial Agribusiness Underwriting at Country Financial, says they did make some changes in the program this year. “So we did change up the speakers, the AI speaker was a new addition. We did bring back Matthew Reardon, who was the meteorologist and that was by popular demand. We can’t not recognize the weather in our industry because that’s truly what drives the losses for the most part from a crop insurance perspective.”
Lindsey Rinkenberger, Country Financial (4:35)
Reardon told CIRB members that the big story weather-wise right now is transition from La Nina. “We’re looking at cooler than average sea surface temperatures in the Pacific. The expectation right now is we’re probably going to transition at some point, at least a 60% chance from the Climate Prediction Center into an El Nino. We typically prefer El Nino in North America because we get better rains over our most productive growing regions. It tends to reduce drought pressure,” said Reardon. “I’m keeping an eye on that transition to El Nino, where we’re going in the Northeast Pacific. And those will probably end up deciding where that drought pressure ends up this year.”