A co-operative insurance firm has dished out advice on what to insure and not insure for better farm management.
According to Ian Yard-Smith, chief operations officer at Achmea Australia, farmers need to be more strategic when it comes to insurance – insuring the big risks with potentially large impacts, and not insuring those they can mitigate themselves.
Yard-Smith said that while cropping farmers with big businesses – those with high-machinery outlays and sophisticated operations – generally managed their insurance well, there were many risks they need not insure, Grain Central reported.
“My message is that farmers can become better farmers by taking better control of their insurance portfolio, whether it is at the lower end where they can fix the thing themselves or the higher level,” Yard-Smith said at a recently held Innovation Generation Conference in Wagga Wagga, in southern NSW.
Yard-Smith said astute farmers could better manage their operations and enhance their insurance portfolio by using their farms' insurance risk assessments.
“Insurance companies are very good at identifying risk and what it is that they are prepared to take on,” Yard-Smith told Grain Central. “So, when you get to that point with an insurance company, you know they are the risks you, as a farmer, really need to be looking at.”
