What is Pollution Liability?
One of the most common types of liability claims for farmers are for pollution liability. This is where, through a fuel leak, manure leak, or over spraying accident damage is done to neighboring property.
Most general farm liability policies will exclude bodily injury or property damage that occurs as a result of a pollution incident. It’s important to work with your broker to include a separate Farmers’ Limited Pollution Liability in your policy to protect your farm operation from pollution related lawsuits.
Typical pollution liability coverage includes bodily injury, property damage, and clean-up costs but will be subject to coverage limitations past a certain dollar value. It’s important that your broker work with you to make sure you have the correct limit of coverage that your farm operation. Like other parts of the farm insurance there are exclusions. One includes failure to report a pollution incident and start remedial action. The policy will state that only pollution incidents that occur during the time period that the policy is in force will be covered, this means issues that occurred prior to starting the insurance policy are not covered.
