Farm Progress

Rural Community Insurance Services policy holders can use data platform to share information.

Willie Vogt

May 17, 2022

3 Min Read
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ACCURATE MEASUREMENT: Crop insurance reporting can be time consuming, especially in the crunch of planting. The Climate Corporation and Rural Community Insurance Services have a new data-sharing collaboration to make acreage and crop reporting easier and more accurate.Willie Vogt

The rise in the use of data capture tools on the farm offers farmer benefits for managing crops and livestock, but new links between these tools and third-party companies offer added capabilities. A key area is easier reporting of data from your farm to third-party vendors of supplies and services including crop insurance.

Climate FieldView has added a new reporting option to its system linking with Rural Community Insurance Services policyholders. “We’re expanding the options for farmers so they can use their FieldView data to do insurance reporting,” says Seth Erwin, Climate strategic account lead.

The FieldView platform is already available to share information with Farmers Mutual Hail Insurance Company of Iowa and NAU Country Insurance. Erwin explains that this new relationship will provide similar benefits to users.

Adds Nicholas Luett, mapping services product manager, RCIS: “We’ve had a commitment since 2019 to do more with digital agriculture and precision agriculture and with that we really want to make sure that we save the producers time with the data they’ve already been using and capturing.” He notes RCIS also has a similar partnership with John Deere.

Maximizing work already done

Running through a field whether spraying, planting or tilling, you collect information. That’s a big change from the past when that practice might have only been logged in a notebook. Few farmers like the paperwork associated with reporting for USDA or third party providers including insurance companies.

Using precision management tools like Climate FieldView linked to those vendors, farmers can save a lot of time. Luett explains that with real-time access to information a farmer’s RCIS agent to make acreage and production reporting easier.

Once initiated by the farmer, the secure connection allows RCIS policyholders to report acres and production data digitally directly from their FieldView account, helping simplify the process during the busy crop insurance reporting seasons. The deadline for reporting information is July 15, which can come up fast.

Climate’s Erwin notes that farmers often ask about data privacy for these kinds of situations. “We try to be transparent about what the platform does, and how controls the data,” he says. “But at the end of the day as farmers start to use these technologies and these partnerships, they realize this is really helpful.”

The digital sharing of the information does more than make the process easier. The information provided can be more accurate. “The planted acreage isn’t necessarily what FSA map is or even what the boundary is, so they know they can start to get those acreages a little bit more accurate,” Erwin adds.

Luett notes that your insurance agent isn’t interested in all the agronomic data provided. “We take the basic data for crop insurance purposes, so we don’t capture seeding rates or anything that the farmer is worried about,” he adds. “We really take the acres they planted, the plant data and we make sure it’s a true representation of what that planting actually is in that field.”

One issue RCIS considers when pulling in data is overlapping rows. “If the producer doesn’t have row shutoff control, we can make sure we get that exactly the most accurate acre count we could actually get to,” Luett says.

The process is simple for RCIS customers, who simply sign into their FieldView account from RCIS, and the data can be shared.

These data-sharing relationships can help farmers maximize their information in new ways. Adding accuracy to what task is done on each field, and when, can be time consuming. Relationships like this between Climate and RCIS make it easier.

You can learn more by visiting a local RCIS agent, or climate.com.

About the Author(s)

Willie Vogt

Willie Vogt has been covering agricultural technology for more than 40 years, with most of that time as editorial director for Farm Progress. He is passionate about helping farmers better understand how technology can help them succeed, when appropriately applied.

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