retrieve USDA RMA Summary of Business and actuarial data files for crop insurance underwriting research
domain: rma.usda.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Access RMA's Summary of Business tool at rma.usda.gov for the desired crop year, state, county, and crop combination.
Download the relevant Summary of Business data files (available for crop years back to 1989 through the current year) along with the accompanying record-description/layout files needed to parse the fixed file structure.
Use the Actuarial Information Browser (or the underlying actuarial data files) to retrieve crop-specific rating information, such as premium rates and coverage offers, at the subcounty level.
Cross-reference Summary of Business experience data (premium, liability, indemnities) against the actuarial data to support underwriting or research analysis.
Rebuild ingestion logic periodically since RMA republishes Summary of Business and actuarial data on its own update schedule tied to crop year and program changes.
Known gotchas
RMA distributes this data primarily as downloadable zipped data files with record-layout documentation, not a conventional REST API — plan for a file-ingestion pipeline rather than synchronous API calls.
Record layouts can differ between older and current crop years, so a parser built for one crop year's file structure may not work unmodified on another.
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