Civilizations started with agriculture, and though many eras have passed, agriculture is still considered to be one of the most important industries for developing countries. Agriculture is the backbone of many economies in the world, forming the basis of food security for everyone. Roughly 2 billion people, 26.7%  of the world population derive their livelihood from agriculture and farming. The global agricultural land area is approximately 5 billion hectares or 35% of the global land surface. This huge amount of land for the agriculture industry comes with its importance. 

There are a few factors that make the agriculture industry one of the backbones of many economies: 

1. Raw materials: Agriculture is the main source of raw materials for many industries. Raw materials such as rice, coffee, and palm oil. 
2. Trade: Agriculture trade makes up a huge chunk of international trade. Agriculture international trade helps to answer some food production problems, due to climatic or other reasons. 
3. National revenue: in many developing countries, the agriculture sector provides the country with a great deal of revenue from its agricultural exports. 
4. Jobs: The agriculture sector in many countries provides a variety of jobs to many people. This in turn reduces the high rate of unemployment in many developing countries. From farming to machinery trading, and data scientists, the Agri industry holds a vast pool of employment opportunities. 

Agriculture Insurance

Understanding the need for agriculture in many countries and economies, it would be imperative to also understand the role of agriculture insurance in these countries. There are lots of risks involved in the whole agriculture life cycle. Agriculture insurance is resurfacing as one of the most important risk management tools, especially in light of the need to improve agricultural competitiveness. Smallholder farmers are well served by agricultural insurance since it increases their resilience by preventing or limiting potentially devastating financial losses. So the main focus for agriculture insurance is to hedge against contingent loss.

With a level of agricultural production ranked second in the world, India is a major agricultural powerhouse. The government of India has started the PMFBY scheme with the objectives to provide insurance coverage and financial support to the farmers in the event of failure of any of the notified crops as a result of natural calamities, pests & diseases. to stabilize the income of farmers to ensure their continuance in farming. to encourage farmers to adopt innovative and modern agricultural practices and to ensure the flow of credit to the agriculture sector. This scheme has seen great success as it has seen sums insured significantly increasing, with market-wide premiums up by nearly 300 percent from about US$850 million in 2015/16 to around US$3.3 billion in 2016/17.

Remote Sensing For Agriculture Insurance

Agriculture does not have a very good reputation when it comes to sustainability. The ever-growing need to feed our growing population incites an increase in deforestation and other climate change issues. However, can we ensure food security and safety by harnessing the power of satellite imagery and analytics? Read up more on our case study here! The usage of satellite and drone imagery to monitor and understand crop areas is unprecedented, due to the huge availability of satellite imagery data, and the frequency it can be viewed at. Now you can use satellite imagery to give a vital sort of information allowing farmers to map, monitor, and even predict crop yield.

Challenges faced by insurance companies
Agriculture insurance companies face many issues in the whole insurance life cycle. EOfactory has come up with an end-to-end solution, creating a customizable workflow for Agri insurance companies. Here are some of the challenges that Agri insurance companies face.

• Difficulty coordination and monitoring field surveys – During unforeseen events, there is a huge number of claims that are raised by farmers. This results in difficulties coordinating and monitoring the survey activities.
• Inaccuracy in the extent and intensity of crop damage. – field executives use visual interpretations to calculate crop loss. This would likely lead to inaccuracies in the results and fundamentally the payouts to the farmers.
• Inaccurate farmer plot location for damage assessment – This is a difficulty in visualizing and understanding the area size of farmer photos for an accurate calculation of loss.
• No proper visualization on each farmer’s plot for pre and post-event crop comparison. – There is a lack of scientific information which needs to be presented to the government for claim payouts.

FarmVigil Powered By EOfactory

Farmvigil is a comprehensive information platform designed to collect details of farmers, plots, crops, and their conditions, automatic area measurements along with geo-tagged field photographs. Its associated web dashboard provides a synoptic view of all field data that helps in-field staff management, monitoring, and undertaking survey analytics.

• Farmvigil Mobile Application: EOfactory has created a mobile application that can be used by field surveyors to capture the 4 corners of farmer plots with field photographs tagged with farmer information. With this, you can
  • Understand exact farmer plot details
  • Real-time data ingestion by surveyors which is synchronized with a dashboard
  • The data includes visual interpretation of crop damage, farmer details, and geo-tagging information of the farmers’ plot.

FarmVigil Database Management

EOfactory has developed a cutting-edge centralized dashboard that assists to monitor field activities live. This removes the cumbersome process of coordinating and monitoring the survey activities.

Farmvigil Insurance Dashboard

EOfactory has developed an intuitive dashboard where users can view each farm plot with different indices on different dates to analyze the crop loss of the farmers. This allows for pre and post-crop event comparison, giving you a scientific crop loss analysis and crop damage assessment.

Through EOfactory, getting the data, processing the data, and extracting information for Agri insurance providers is easier than it ever was! EOfactory harness the power of satellite imagery and machine learning to bring about a sustainable environment, where securing the safety of food is our end goal.