When I first started working on the program side, ASCS had a disaster payment program, covering low yields and prevented planting for its then-usual crops: wheat, barley, oats, corn, sorghum, rice and upland cotton. The auditors had been critical of its administration, saying that the way the program operation ended up paying the same farm in multiple years.
From what I remember the problem was a combination of legislation and human nature, or rather legislation and administration reflecting human nature. Farmers are optimists, they have to be to survive the disappointments, so they remember the good years and not the bad. That means the laws they supported provided for "Olympic averaging", ignoring bad years but usually not the great years. So the resulting payment yields were high, too high if you agree with the auditors that disaster payments from the government should be unusual.
The further problem was variability--optimistic farmers grow crops on marginal and hazard-prone land. They've done that forever--much of the Great Plains in the 19th century. Sometimes farmers are able to modify geography, using irrigation, levees, drainage, or terraces depending on the problem. We're finding the limits to such measures, as now in the Central Valley of California.
Anyhow, this ramble was set off by a new EWG report on crop insurance payments on flood prone land.
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