6 BULLETIN 7*6. XT. S. DEPAETINrEXT OF AGMOTLTTJBE, 
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 95 S 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 Xew England 
and oh 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 TTest special 
windstorm insurance companies doing a St ate- 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 risk- 
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 S9S 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 319 companies reported their maximum 
single risk as larger than $4,000. and only 5S 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 
