This brief projects 2026 drought-attributed crop insurance indemnities for six major U. S. field crops using county-level panel data from 2003 through 2025. Early-season Drought Severity and Coverage Index (DSCI) values are linked with USDA Risk Management Agency cause-of-loss records in a county fixed-effects framework to estimate the relationship between drought severity and insurance losses. Applied to January--May 2026 drought conditions, the model projects approximately 8. 4 billion in drought indemnities nationally, with losses concentrated in the Great Plains and Midwest. These projections provide a data-driven baseline for assessing the Federal Crop Insurance Program's financial exposure to ongoing drought.
Dylan Turner (2026) studied this question.