One insurance provider is creating individualized risk profiles for farms, a process the company calls “precision insurance.”
“Our goal with that tagline is to say you’re not average, so your insurance company should treat you that way,” said Kyle Gibson, AGI3’s lead broker and managing director of operations.
Why it matters: The agriculture industry is looking for robust business risk management programs as farmers are told to prepare for more volatile weather in the future.
Gibson, who staffed the AGI3 booth at the Ag in Motion farm show July 17, said many insurance programs treat customers as an aggregate rather than an individual. That has potential to see one farmer subsidizing their neighbour.
“There’s a big gap in the market in terms of data collection and using that for risk management and pricing. So, working very closely with growers, we take a ton of information and we try to price risk better.”
The resulting insurance product can create different profiles within a single farm.
“When we sit with a farmer, we individualize that pricing at the quarter-section level,” said Gibson. “So, for a larger farm, if you had canola in the south of your farm and canola in the north of the farm, they could potentially be differently priced.”
That means no two farmers pay the same price, and even an individual farmer’s price can vary depending on where they plant their crops.
AGI3 has mapped every legal land description (LLD) across Western Canada. Producers can go into the software and upload shape files, or connect to a third-party app like the John Deere Operation Centre.
“Then we intersect those LLDs, and we intersect all the pricing together,” said Gibson. “It does get pretty detailed.”
Growing foothold
AGI3 is in its second year and has policies across all three Prairie provinces. Its flagship product is called AgriEnhance, a customizable, yield-based plan that allows farmers to choose individual crop or whole farm coverage.
A number of other products are on the horizon, the company said. One of those is a grain contract insurance option called ForwardProtect.
“The basic idea is that if you can’t meet your commitments, we pay your bio-penalties,” said Gibson. “We’re working with one of our large grain buyer partners on this one.”
It also has a hail protection product lined up that may provide a speedier process from claim to payout.
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