22 DEPARTMENT BULLETIN 912. 
well to more than one piece of land, or that the insured may other- 
wise either carelessly, or with intent to defraud, make misstatements 
in regard to the insured crop or the damage suffered thereon. These 
phases of the moral hazard are, therefore, guarded against in the hail 
policy as well as in the fire policy. 
Because, in the case of hail insurance, the insured can not himself 
bring about the contingency insured against, slight consideration, as 
a rule, has been given to the question of overinsurance. While a 
maximum has almost invariably been fixed by each company on the 
amount written per acre, concurrent insurance purchased from other 
companies has until recently been given little attention. Hence, in- 
stances have occurred in which individuals have taken out insurance 
in several different companies on the same crop, making the total of 
such insurance greatly in excess of the value of any possible harvest 
from the acreage in question. Such a practice may, of course, be 
characterized as gambling in hail insurance and is no more to be 
defended than gambling in any other field of human activity. 
Unless the locality in question happens to be peculiarly susceptible 
to hail and the premiums have not been adjusted to meet such condi- 
tions, the gambler in hail insurance is. of course, playing with a die 
heavily loaded against him. With fair " luck," however, it has been 
possible for individuals operating on this plan to pocket occasional 
winnings. Especially was this true before cooperation in the adjust- 
ment of losses came into practice among many of the larger writers 
of hail insurance. 
The maximum amount of hail insurance per acre written by the in- 
dividual company has been increased in recent years in response to 
the higher value of farm crops. While formerly $8 or $10 were 
common limits, nearly all companies operating in the Middle West, 
where the bulk of the hail insurance is carried, now write a maximum 
amount of $12 per acre on cereal crops grown on nonirrigated land 
and $25 per acre on the same crops grown on irrigated land. In some 
of the Eastern States $20 per acre is written on cereal crops by indi- 
vidual companies even though such crops are grown by the ordinary 
method. In the case of cotton such maximum usually ranges from 
$l'0 to $30 per acre, and in the case of tobacco and other crops requir- 
ing a considerable amount of hand labor, it reaches $100 or more per 
acre. Relatively little hail insurance has hitherto been written on 
truck or orchard crops and no fixed standards as to amounts per acre, 
or in many States even as to rates, appear to have been agreed upon 
by the companies. 
While the hail insurance companies have thus placed a limit on 
the amount of insurance that they will individually write on a given 
acre, which limit is well within the probable value of the crop, con- 
current insurance was formerly, as above stated, permitted to any 
amount desired by the insured. At present, however, most com- 
panies in the case of nonirrigated cereal crops prescribe a limit of 
