Aon, a global professional services firm, has partnered with SAGE, an AI-native agricultural risk intelligence company, to launch a new precision crop insurance program in the US to assess agricultural risk more accurately and help price insurance more effectively.
Offered for the 2027 crop year across 15 states, the program is tailored for corn and soybean farmers through a partnership with AgriCap, a specialised agricultural insurer.
It serves as a complement to federal crop insurance, delivering field-level coverage that aligns more closely with specific risks and underlying asset values.
Federal crop insurance, which covers nearly 90% of US corn and soybean acreage, is priced on the average risk in each county, even though risk varies widely from field to field, leaving many growers paying premiums that may not reflect their individual risk.
To translate SAGE’s insights into viable insurance products, Aon delivers advance Risk Capital data, analytics, capabilities and expertise, while connecting these tailored solutions to the required capital providers.
The new program is being tested through a four-county pilot developed by the Resilience in Agricultural Lending and Insurance Coalition (RALIC), with partial funding provided by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
The pilot encompasses more than one million agricultural acres, representing approximately 12% of Michigan farmland.
“With this new approach, we can translate what is happening on the land into risk signals that the insurance market can understand and act upon,” said Jonathan Sherrill, Senior Vice President, Agriculture Resilience Center, Aon. “When we make resilience visible, it can be underwritten, which means we can syndicate capital behind it.”
SAGE has built deeply contextualized AI models that combine the observation and understanding of soil, water, weather and human interaction.
By combining these complex data sets that historically could not be analysed together at scale, patterns of risk and resilience can be understood that were previously difficult or impossible to identify.
Bill Veghte, CEO and Co-Founder, SAGE, commented: “Farmers have understood that every field is different, but the ability of the USDA and the insurance industry to understand those differences at scale has been a significant obstacle.
“The SAGE AI engine brings together billions of datapoints together in a way that simply wasn’t feasible before advancements in AI, creating a much clearer picture of the factors influencing risk and resilience from the individual field to the entire US corn belt.”
Serving as an early demonstration of how field-level agricultural intelligence can support insurance solutions at scale, the Michigan pilot will offer key insights.
Leveraging this information, Aon and SAGE are working with AgriCap as a preferred insurance partner for the 2027 crop cycle, providing an early proof point for a model intended to expand across various regions, crops, and initiatives.
