6 BULLETIN 186, U. S. DEPAKTMEFT OF AGRICULTURE. 



HAZARDS AND RISKS. 



All the companies returning questionnaires gave information con- 

 cerning the hazards against which insurance was written. Thirty- 

 three companies insured against fire only and 958 against fire and 

 lightning. One hundred and seventy companies reported giving 

 so-called combined protection, covering fire, lightning, and wind- 

 storm in their contract. 



Farmers' mutuals ' writing combined protection were found in 

 nearly all States with the exception of those located in ISTew England 

 and on the Pacific coast. In the case of companies operating in all 

 or the greater part of a State the offering of windstorm protection 

 as well as of fire and lightning protection is a fairly common prac- 

 tice everywhere. This practice in so far as it relates to county or 

 relatively local companies, however, is limited largely to the States 

 of the South. In a number of the States of the Middle West special 

 windstorm insurance companies doing a State-wide * business and 

 working in -close cooperation with the local fire insurance mutuals 

 have been developed. The plan of carrying windstorm insurance by 

 a relatively local company has proved disastrous in a number of in- 

 stances, the losses from a single severe storm in a community not 

 infrequently exceeding all available resources of a small company. 

 From the point of view of the fire hazard, on the other hand, so far 

 as the typical farming community is concerned, each group of farm 

 buildings and to a considerable extent each building in the group 

 constitutes a separate and distinct risk, and hence nothing corre- 

 sponding to a conflagration hazard is present. Considerable allow- 

 ance may of course be made for differences in the probability of 

 severe windstorms in different sections of the country, but experience 

 has proved that few, if any sections are entirely exempt from the 

 most destructive form of windstorm known, namely, the tornado. 



All but four of the companies reporting gave information concern- 

 ing the property insured. One thousand sixty-four companies re- 

 ported insuring only farm property and similar segregated risks 

 within the limits of cities or villages, while 93 companies reported 

 insuring also a larger or smaller amount of other city property. 

 Companies reporting more than 35 per cent of the insurance on their 

 books as city property were, as already stated, not included in this 

 summary. 



Among the 898 companies which reported the maximum single 

 risk accepted by them, the highest for any company was $15,000 and 

 the lowest $750. A total of 349 companies reported their maximum 

 single risk as larger than $4,000, and only 58 companies provided 

 for a maximum of less than $2,000. The average of such maximum 

 risk for these companies was $3,994. Two hundred sixty-three 



