With the emergence of technology-driven practices in agriculture, many data technology companies are partnering with crop insurance providers to provide streamlined reporting and better risk management modeling. V Home Insurance.com, looks at some of the recent noteworthy partnerships between data technology companies and crop insurance providers in the U.S.

The Climate Corporation and Farmer’s Mutual Hail Insurance Company of Iowa have tied up to enable farmers to connect their field data for seamless delivery of crop insurance reporting. To offer real-time field data with customized crop insurance products, Farmers Edge, a data-driven technology company, signed an agreement with Partner Re. To further strengthen this trend, Rain and Hail, a division of Chubb’s agriculture, signed a deal with Bushel to digitally connect farmers with customers.

Farmer’s Business Network (FBN) announced it would offer insurance for crops through FBN Insurance, LLC. These agreements help farmers using precision farming to protect their plants  through various climatic conditions and provides risk management solutions as per their requirement.

The chart below represents the partnerships between agriculture companies and insurance crop providers.

Climate Corporation and Farmers Mutual Hail insurance: To make the reporting process easier, The Climate Corporation, a Bayer subsidiary, provides Climate FieldView data to the insurance company, eliminating the need for manual entry. Along with that, the claims process for adjusting crop losses can be made easier for policyholders by using data collected from the FieldView platform.

Farmers Edge partnership with PartnerRe: This collaboration helps offer real-time field data with customized crop insurance products. Through this partnership, Farmers Edge is making digital agronomy a reality and empowering farmers all over the globe with data-driven insights so they can maximize crop yields, make better decisions and secure tailor-made insurance solutions based on their requirements.

Rain and Hail, a division of Chubb’s insurance, signed a multi-year agreement with Bushel: Bushel’s software program allows grain elevators, co-ops and ethanol plants to automate sharing scale tickets from participating partners with their crop insurance agent.The addition of Bushel provides growers and agents a quick and efficient way to report critical production information that can help save them time during the busy harvest system.

Climate Corporation teams up with NAU Country Insurance: The Climate Corporation (a Bayer subsidiary) and Nau Country Insurance (a QBE insurance company) have entered a platform partnership, allowing NAU to utilize The Climate Corporation’s Climate FieldView digital agriculture platform, to ultimately enhance the way farmers report crop insurance claims in the U.S.

Farmobile partners with AmTrust Agriculture Insurance Services: By using this platform they aim to deliver a faster, cheaper and smarter workflow for crop insurance reporting through better data management, by providing farmers with innovative, yet practical, risk management and data management solutions.

There are several insurance programs being offered nationwide. Farmer Business Network is one such insurance carrier which provides a full range of crop insurance services and products in selected states in 2019, which includes Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas. The company says it will provide personalized, smarter risk management programs to secure farmers in down years without dragging in profit. To make the process more efficient and to reduce the time it takes to report.

Digital Technologies Present Insurance Opportunities in Farming

Farming is considered high risk since it is dependent on unpredictable variables like weather and other external factors. A wide array of smart technology including robotics, sensors, drones, data management software and analytics are being used to help address some of the challenges faced by governments, farmers and insurers. Some of the key issues include climate change, coverage issues and requirement of new insurance models. The recent digitalization of agriculture has been groundbreaking for agri-insurance providers. In order to effectively address the current challenges, insurance providers will have to leverage the capabilities of the emerging digital-agriculture ecosystem.

Climate conditions: With the help of data accessibility to multi players in the   agri-value chain, most of the insurance providers offer insights to drive decision-making that lowers risk and increases outputs.

Risk Mitigation: While insurance providers traditionally focused on loss occurring through natural disasters such as hail, drought, and disease, etc., nowadays the growth of risk is also anticipated from other aspects such as contractual disputes, product recalls, and tougher regulatory measures in the supply chain of the agri-industry.

Lack of coverage: Owing to the cost of coverage being high, most of the agri-insurance coverage is low. However, USDA’s Leann Nelson notes that with better weather and crop-history data, the U.S. government can develop risk protection tools that can help generate actuarially sound crops.

New insurance models needed: In the agri-insurance process, traditional “boots in the field” methods and classic risk models are no longer relevant. Index-based insurance (IBI) makes use of real time data from satellites and ongoing risk assessment with payouts triggered by the threshold beyond which agricultural production begins to suffer. Data, equipment, technology and financial service providers, governments and new entrants are all participating to position leading agricultural players within the digital-agriculture ecosystems.

According to the United Nations, the global population is expected to reach around 9.8 billion by 2050, threatening a severe shortage of food production. Digital advancements in agriculture and farming are set in place to combat this issue, and also to serve and aid farmers with effective risk management tools and technologies. Digitalization is a game changer for the agriculture industry, insurers and farmers alike. With a myriad of applications used for efficient and cost effective food production, the market is a clear indicator of the success of precision farming technology.