ProAg Case Study

Client requirements

ProAg partnered with PlanetWatchers to help envision the future of acreage reporting and wind damage analysis. The goal is to provide in-season services that will increase data collection validation accuracy and speed.

The crops of specific interest are corn, soybean and cotton.

Acreage reporting services include planting dates, crop acres and crop classiﬁcation focusing on increasing data accuracy and optimizing manual data collection.

Wind damage analysis for ProAg required rapid large-scale assessments, reducing the manual claims adjustments process, reducing overheads and optimising the claims process for their customers.

ProAg is one of 13 Approved Insurance Providers (AlP’s) of crop insurance in the United States. Founded in the 1920’s ProAg was one of the ﬁrst companies in the crop insurance industry.
ProAg is built on a solid foundation of experience, dedicated to quality customer care and overriding value or long-term business partnerships.
ProAg is committed to delivering world-class systems to help their agents, insureds and employees grow with conﬁdence.
With millions of insured acres across the U.S and thousands of farmers, growers, and agents who rely on them, ProAg works continuously to develop and refresh its technology to meet the needs of the customers they support.

Our solution

Using SAR (synthetic aperture radar) technology, our extensive expertise and highly efﬁcient algorithms, we worked closely with ProAg throughout 2021 to provide detailed CLU analysis at scale.
Unlike other remote sensing technologies, SAR is uninterrupted by light and weather conditions providing continuous monitoring throughout the season. Our algorithms have been validated by being trained on more than 50 million acres of unique date elements across crops in the U.S.
Complementing our analysis with historical data points has allowed us to provide ProAg with signiﬁcantly increased accuracy throughout all acreage reporting services saving an estimated 40% of time in the ﬁeld validating wind damage.

The results

Wind damage

90,630

Acres of damage

40%

Time saved in the field

Proven to match ground truth data

Our wind damage service detected insurable damage across 90,630 acres based on three levels of damage; high, medium, and low.
Providing this analysis quickly after a wind event enables adjusters in the field to pinpoint the worst-hit areas providing more efficient validation.
Adjusters verify that our analysis correlates with the damage seen in the field and saves up to an estimated 40% of time spent in the field.
This level of wind damage analysis provides ProAg with the potential to process claims faster and more accurately, benefiting their customers.

“The large-scale wind damage assessment provided by PlanetWatchers soon after events consistently correlated with the damage seen in the field. We can save up to an estimated 40% of time spent in the field to assess each event.”

Steve Renter – Director of Innovation at ProAg

Acreage reporting

90%

Planting dates

97.7%

Crop acres

95.6%

Crop classification

Our work with ProAg initially demonstrates 90% accuracy on planting dates: an increase of 14% from manually collated data. We also provided planting dates within two weeks of the crop being planted in the ground.
To date we have increased ProAg crop acres data by 9% achieving 97.9% accuracy on our reporting within only eight weeks from the planting date.
Our crop classification is currently seeing 95.6% accuracy providing a further 5% increase on the initial data that ProAg provided. Further validation of these results and ongoing development of our services is expected to provide ProAg with the ability to consistently collect more accurate acreage reporting before the USDA deadline of July 15th.

“Early results of this pilot show an increase in accuracy across the full spectrum of our acreage reporting. We will continue to develop these services with PlanetWatchers to collect more accurate acreage reporting for future acreage reporting dates.”

Steve Renter – Director of Innovation at ProAg