AI and drones boost crop insurance in agriculture sector

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and drones in the agriculture sector to customize crop insurance is propelling the growth of the crop insurance industry. Crop insurance is a protection tool that protects farmers and agri-stakeholders from an unexpected loss that occurred due to unfavorable weather or pest control leading to crop failure by compensating them for preventing huge financial losses. And agri-tech is playing a huge role in this.

Today’s farmers, according to American Family Insurance, are able to better understand the work that needs to be done to optimize yields and boost their bottom line. Moreover, new technologies are changing the farming industry with smarter supply chain tracking systems and deep learning tools that help farmers make critical farming decisions.

From delivering new ways to explore the topography of the acreage with drones to managing inventories with blockchain controls, AI is shifting how farmers are operating. A good example is the Indian government’s use of artificial intelligence solutions, CropIn’s SmartFarm and SmartRisk, to digitize farm management solutions and enable accurate and efficient execution of CCE to ensure timely clearance of insurance claims under its Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana. Such measures are expected to fuel the market growth.

Another good example is IBM’s Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture. It offers farmers a wealth of weather and crop-related data. Like an electronic medical record, their electronic field record delivers weather data, both historic and near real-time. Moisture data in soil is available at multiple depths as well. These AI technologies combined with planting details, fertilizer application, pesticide schedules produce an accurate seedling-to-harvest output report. Satellite and drone imagery can even be overlaid atop this dataset and that’s where IBM’s AI machine learning comes into play. Offering strategies based on these findings, farmers can use IBM’s AI decision making power to drive critical crop-production plans.

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Drones are increasingly used by crop insurers to collect data regarding damaged crops to mitigate the losses of farmers. According to EMR, drone mapping software can be used to process and visualize the data to analyze crop loss effectively. “This is increasing the adoption of drones in crop insurances, which is projected to fuel the market growth. In addition, drones can be employed for soil and field analysis, irrigation and crop monitoring,” the report said. “Moreover, the rising  use of analysis software to quantify results and indicate the damages, which make the process of crop insurance faster, more accurate and more efficient, is providing further impetus to the growth of the crop insurance industry.”