Harvest cover: what to check before the season starts

A pre-season check across declarations, machinery, stored grain and contractor arrangements before harvest pressure starts.

Heading into the 2026 harvest, a number of clients are reviewing their cover earlier than usual. Market appetite for fire and stored grain risk has shifted over the past 18 months and the impact is that a few decisions you may have left to the last minute in previous years are worth bringing forward.

Three areas tend to come up most often in our conversations with farming clients: machinery breakdown cover for headers and chaser bins, fire and accidental damage on standing crop, and the way stored grain is declared. None of these are new, but the way they interact with current policy wordings has changed enough to warrant a closer look.

It is also worth checking how your contractor and labour arrangements line up with your liability cover. Where harvest is partly contracted out, who is responsible for what is not always as obvious as it should be — and this is a common cause of claim disputes after the fact.

“A ten minute conversation before harvest is almost always cheaper than a fortnight of paperwork afterwards.”

None of this is unusual or alarming. It is simply the kind of pre-season check that tends to make claim time more straightforward and which most growers prefer to handle calmly in winter rather than under pressure in October.