The Rural Voice, 2001-12, Page 17station for all calculation.l.
Incredibly, drought hit the area
again that summer. Hay crops again
suffered. Ellicott, who keeps
historical records of every year's
crop, calculated she'd harvested 66
per cent of her normal crop. Since
insurance payments kick in for crops
below 80 per cent of the 30 -year
average, she calculated she should get
a payout of about $1,400. When the
Agricorp final report arrived on
December 15, she was shocked to see
there would be no payment.
According to the computer simulation
she should have received 84.9 per
cent of her normal crop.
At first, Ellicott remembers, she
thought she was alone in her
frustration, but then the
grapevine started working. People
began to realize that more and more
people who thought they should have
received payouts had been
disappointed. By January the issue
had started to snowball. Ellicott
called together a group of people
she'd come to know had received no
payment despite a depleted crop and
they began to realize how many
farmers were in the same boat.
The group soon learned about
Smith and his drought relief
committee, still active from the
summer before and filled with
unhappy Agricorp customers. The
two groups came together to form a
united committee.
The sense of frustration after being
turned down for government aid in
1998 because farmers didn't take out
crop insurance, followed by a sense
of injustice at not getting any payouts
in 1999 fueled the anger and
determination of the original group of
about 20 farmers, says Blake.
"People had been trying to let
Agricorp know they had a problem
(with forage insurance)," she says.
Thus began a process that saw a
group of 38 farmers fight the issue all
the way to a Crop Insurance Tribunal
last spring, at which they presented
more than 130 pages of
documentation, much of it researched
and assembled by Ellicott.
"Harriet did basically all the
research," says Blake, who helped
organize the massive amounts of
research material Ellicott assembled.
"If I'd known what I was getting
into I'd never have gone there," she
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