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Using UAVs improve crop insurance claims

ADM Crop Risk Services will utilize unmanned aerial vehicles to improve its crop insurance claims processing.  The company received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration this week.

Greg Mills, president of ADM CRS says the company is working to expedite the crop insurance claims process.  “The deployment of the UAV will allow our adjusters to be more efficient and do more claims at a faster rate,” he says.  “And two, it will help them be more accurate.  We’ll have pictures that will document some of the damage and consequences of the field at the same time.”

He tells Brownfield ADM CRS expects the service to provide a much more accurate claim, combining UAV technology that exists today with ADM CRS’ software.  “Through color and through field boundaries we can identify where hail damage was, you can identify the severity of the hail damage,” he says.  “You can also through the pictures identify where there has been damage from wind.  Wind is not a straight-line event where it takes the whole field – it might just take stripes.”

Mills says this will be a farmer permissioned service.  “We are not going to go out to a field in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, or Nebraska and throw a UAV up and start flying the field,” he says.  “The farmer will be alerted prior to our arrival and the farmer will be asked for permission to come to the field.”

ADM CRS will test and continue to develop the technology through the 2015 crop year – with an expected launch in 2016.