Andrew Burdock, CEO of Insure.ag, says he saw a strong need for specialty crop growers to have data to make better decisions on the amount of risk they undertake with a crop insurance policy. Burdock, a co-founder of Aerobotics, which uses drone and phone imagery to provide farming insights, says he also saw this need as crop insurance adjusters used Aerobotics’ insights to gain better data.
“We saw a real opportunity to, instead of doing the inspections and doing essentially audits for crop insurance companies, we could go back to our core, which was working with growers — and instead of using this data for the audits, use it for the grower to set up this crop insurance policy,” he says. “Because what we’re seeing was a lot of these numbers in these crop insurance policies were incorrect.”
Burdock says that growers might take a policy out for 1,000 acres, but there might be declining trees, pump houses, wells or missing trees that would impact claims.
“A lot of these guys had 100% stand in their policies,” he says. “It was leading to issues when a claim came around and the adjuster came out, and then there was an argument about what was in the policy upfront. We saw an opportunity, really, to become a crop insurance broker using our data to help growers put the policies together.”
Burdock says this is what started Aerobotics Crop Insurance Solutions (ACIS), which Burdock has now purchased and spun off into its own entity, Insure.ag.
“We built up quite a significant customer base there, and we’ve really helped mainly large growing groups where the guys have got 20,000 acres — very difficult to manage that crop insurance policy,” he says. We’ve always really wanted to grow this thing out. I think we’ve piloted pretty much well inside Aerobotics and it came to a point where we needed to grow the team and really like take this thing to the next level. Over the past year, I’ve been out trying to raise capital to purchase the crop insurance business out of a robotics and spin it out into its own separate entity.”
Burdock says Insure.ag will use data from Aerobotics and CropGuard to help provide growers with a better understanding of historical trends and future projections for better policies. He says growers often struggle to find the optimal coverage for both farm economics as well as potential risk.
“We have partnered with a company called CropGuard that has built technology to solve for this,” he says. “They’ve got technology that uses AI and goes and looks at historicals for your crop type in your county and also predicts how the future is going to turn out. It does a 10-year forecast analysis of different outcomes and then predicts where it thinks you would have the best bang for your buck on your crop insurance spend.”
Burdock says he wants to bring the insights from Aerobotics and CropGuard together to provide a differentiated experience for growers to help them optimize coverage, reduce waste and mitigate claim risks.
“We’ll provide the contents and inventory for your policy, make sure that’s 100% right and dialed in and no issues when it comes to claims,” he says. “And No. 2, we will help you make the best decision you can in terms of how much money should you spend on your crop insurance so that you get the best return over the next 10 years on that spend.”
Burdock says his team at Insure.ag continues to grow, and while he wants to make sure to provide great service, he wants to make sure that growers have access to the type of technology that can help ease the struggles of purchasing crop protection insurance.
“I think you really need to be leveraging technology to make sure that you know you’re adding more value,” he says. “It’s a significant investment for insurance for these growing groups and to make sure that that investment is protected and is spent wisely.”
