Farmers Edge and Fairfax Brasil partner on data-driven crop insurance

Insurer Fairfax Brasil, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fairfax Financial Holding, has teamed up with Farmers Edge, a specialist in digital agriculture, to bring customised, data-driven crop insurance to growers in Brazil.

This agreement connects a risk management platform powered by field-centric data and artificial intelligence, with insurance as the foundation for developing solutions that address risk factors more directly, dynamically, and affordably for both growers and insurers.

Disrupting traditional crop insurance with the use of real-time data and science-derived insights, this shift aims to make coverage more individualised to a grower’s needs based on changing risks and the actions taken by the grower to mitigate those risks.

Brazil is the fourth largest food producer in the world, but growers continue to face challenges surrounding collecting and accessing the right data to enable more efficient, sustainable, and profitable farming. This data-sparse environment creates a chain of inefficiencies for all stakeholders of the farm by forcing manual processes and uninformed decision-making.

Focused on creating a fully-connected digital agricultural ecosystem, Farmers Edge provides a unique solution that includes the hardware, software, analytics, and infrastructure needed for technology-driven agriculture. Through this partnership, customers are enabled with field-level risk management that includes on-farm weather stations, telematics devices, daily satellite imagery, and a suite of exclusive digital tools, such as highly precise predictive crop models and automatic crop health change detection.

Additionally, Fairfax partners will gain greater visibility of the farms they cover to manage risk better and to provide superior customer service to their clients through automated claims processing, advanced claims analytics, cognitive reporting, and new options to meet individual needs and parameters.

“At Farmers Edge, we’re committed to helping growers protect the economic viability of the farm,” said Wade Barnes, Farmers Edge CEO. “Only around 10 percent of growers in Brazil are insured today, putting most farms at risk of financial ruin. Through this partnership, we can seamlessly connect field data—which shows when crops were planted, combined, and harvested, or which crops have been damaged by weather events—with automated insurance processing to accelerate insurance operations and pay-outs, while also enabling growers to be more efficient, sustainable, and profitable.”

Bruno Camargo, Fairfax Brasil CEO added: “This partnership with Farmers Edge is very strategic for Fairfax Brasil in automating manual, paper-based processes that slow down both growers and partners. With government insurance subsidy programs expected to grow 170 percent in 2020, growers in Brazil are looking for innovative, new insurance products that fit their specific needs, offer a safety net that many do not have today, and can accelerate new product and coverage creation. We are excited to be offering a precision and risk management platform that will enable our growers and partners to be more successful and profitable.”