Linda Vickers was presented with a Crop Insurance Industry Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 Crop Insurance Industry Annual Convention. With her is Greg Deal, chairman of American Association of Crop Insurers (left), and National Crop Insurance Services President Tom Zacharias. (NCIS)

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Linda Vickers, a longtime crop insurance lobbyist and executive who recently retired, was honored with lifetime achievement awards by the crop insurance industry at their recent conventions here. She retired at the end of December from Rural Community Insurance Services.

Linda Vickers
Raised on a cattle and wheat farm in northwest Oklahoma and educated in Oklahoma, she joined what is now the Agriculture Department’s Risk Management Agency in 1978 as a congressional liaison, and that same year joined Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland’s staff, with responsibility for passing the Federal Crop Insurance Act, which expanded the crop insurance program.

The act, which allowed the private sector to begin selling and servicing federal crop insurance policies, passed in 1980.

In early 1981, Vickers went to work as a lobbyist for the National Association of Crop Insurance Agents, and eventually began working for Rural Community Insurance Services.

At ceremonies during the Crop Insurance and Reinsurance Bureau meeting and the Crop Insurance Industry Convention, officials noted that Vickers had been integral in shaping, drafting and eventual passage of major crop insurance acts in 1980, 1994, 1996 and 2000, and in bringing together farm and commodity groups to support the program.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. — a former House Agriculture Committee chairman and Senate Agriculture ranking member who played a key role in crop insurance legislation — House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and House Agriculture ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minn., all contributed video presentations to the ceremony, which noted that she became known in the halls of Congress as “Mrs. Crop Insurance.”

Vickers and her husband Gene, an international agriculture consultant, live on the Oregon coast.