Index-Based-Insurance within Agriculture - PROGIS Software AG

Index‐Based‐Insurance within Agriculture
A concept to integrate the needs of insurance companies and those of farmers into a holistic
business model
INDEX INSURANCE ON TOP of an Agricultural IT Infrastructure, LPIS & FMIS(*) – Agro‐
Sensor‐Data
The base concept behind is to support regional or
countrywide networks. To save costs, to profit from
synergies to foster concerted actions and in terms of labour
efficiency no single solutions are aspired but ways to
cooperate on a common market where many stakeholder
are using and working with one and the same data. Farmers
will on side be disburdened from transferring one and the
same data multiple times (in mainly developed countries)
and on the other side will get easier access to financing due
to effected policies as missing in mainly developing
countries. Insurance companies will profit from current
data and expert information to define indices for crops.
A network of sensor stations – as described in point 5) of
the article “Agricultural IT Infrastructure ‐ Orthoimages –
LPIS & FMIS(*) – Agro‐Sensor‐Data”, that collects the most
important data regarding the weather situation – the type
and amount of sensors is definable by customer`s needs –
provides data based on integrated expert‐models and
transfers this huge amount of information into executable
decisions. These decisions can be used to get significant
data for index insurance.
Local agricultural or agro‐meteorology experts have to work
together with the insurance companies to work out models.
They will tell us that with a significant change of one data
type, a specific amount of damage will or has happened.
We have to study these models, to make them better, to
evaluate them und get also detailed feedback from the
investigating experts. We will have to understand the
relation between the change of one or of several factors
measured by sensor stations and the link to damages on
specific crops.
That is more or less what index‐insurance is about and the
key question besides the expert models is, if it is necessary
to set up the sensor networks alone or if data can be used
together because several users of data or information are
interested in them:
‐ The farmers or advisors because of the their need
of weather forecasting
‐ The farmers or advisors because of their need to
use the data together with expert models for an
optimized pesticide use
‐ The logistic operator because of the link between
logistics planning and weather forecast because
of the need to know the traffic‐ability of the rural
road network
‐ The experts to understand the link between
diseases, moving of diseases in correlation with
the weather situation to learn to prevent or react
in future better;
‐ Other experts that work on risk related
investigation to avoid risk due to prevailing it –
prevailing will always be cheaper than repair;
‐ ………
‐ and last but not least the insurance company that
needs better information for their indexinsurance
needs.
Pic 2: WinGIS with ISO‐model
Cooperation to be able to use the same technology to avoid
in parallel installations for different purposes what means
to be too expensive against cooperative use; and
cooperation and cooperative is nothing new for agriculture
– it is needed also in ICT!
Pic 1: WinGIS ‐ agro‐sensor interface
♦ PROGIS Software GmbH, Postgasse 6, 9500 Villach, AUSTRIA
Tel. +43 (0) 4242-26332, Fax +43-(0)4242-263327, email: office@progis.com, Internet:http://www.progis.com

♦ PROGIS Software GmbH, Postgasse 6, 9500 Villach, AUSTRIA
Tel. +43 (0) 4242-26332, Fax +43-(0)4242-263327, email: office@progis.com, Internet:http://www.progis.com