Crop Indemnity in Kansas

Between 2020 and 2025

Over the past few years, Kansas has endured extreme heatwaves, particularly in 2022 and 2023, yet their impact has gone largely unreported. As a former resident who lived through these events, the silence feels strange. Kansas may not carry the fiscal or demographic weight of other states, but that hardly explains how historic heatwaves passed by without notice.

To investigate, I drew on crop insurance data from the USDA Risk Management Agency's Cause of Loss database (2020–2025), which records the cause of each insured crop loss, the affected crop, and the indemnity paid to the farmer. I supplemented this with temperature data from NOAA and geographic boundary files from the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line shapefiles. Together, these sources allowed me to map, measure, and contextualize the damage.