A start-up company has joined the small number of crop and multi-peril crop insurance (MPCI) providers, offering small and individual farmers index-based insurance to protect against frost and adverse weather conditions.
Arquus, established by agricultural data expert Richard Riddle and backed by SRG Corporate, is offering the Prosper and Protect insurance product, which is weather-based and does not include an indemnity clause to prove yield losses, SRG account director Norm Trethewey told Farm Weekly.
Riddle said the weather-based insurance product was designed so growers could insure their crops at certain times of the season, such as key frost periods.
“It’s a risk management process as opposed to an insurance because it allows farmers to invest in their paddock for the long-term,” he said.
“The problems that growers have had with other multi-peril insurance products is that they are yield-based so as soon as you are looking like you might claim, you walk away from the paddock and you’re not encouraged to keep on going.”
Riddle said the company works with growers throughout the season, allowing them to adjust insurance cover as needed. Unlike other MPCI providers, they look at weather events and how these affect the season.
“Frost is a unique beast but we’ve done a lot of work in the frost areas and we know the patterns,” Riddle told Farm Weekly.
“What varies from place to place is the trigger minimum temperature, so that’s one of the reasons why we work with the grower to go through their data and relate these frost events back to the minimum temperature and tie those events to grid data or BoM data.
“If your risk is frost, you can insure against that so that you could at least make sure that you can move ahead and out of the debt position that you may be in.”
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