Agriculture
Crop yield protection and weather risk management for agricultural operations.
Agriculture is the original use case for weather derivatives — and remains the sector with the highest weather sensitivity globally.
The Problem
Agricultural operations face weather risk at every stage:
- Drought — insufficient rainfall during critical growth periods
- Excess rainfall — waterlogging, harvest delays, crop disease
- Frost/cold stress — damage to sensitive crops during unexpected cold snaps
- Heat stress — yield reduction when temperatures exceed crop-specific thresholds
In emerging markets, these risks are compounded by limited access to traditional crop insurance and inadequate historical weather data for pricing.
How Cliff Horizon Helps
Tier 1 — Agricultural Weather Analytics
- Crop-specific risk profiles combining rainfall, temperature, and soil moisture
- SatSure Layer 1 data provides satellite-derived soil moisture and vegetation indices (NDVI) at farm-level resolution
- Seasonal outlook with probability distributions for key agricultural thresholds
Tier 2 — Warranted Crop Weather Analytics
- Performance warranty on weather predictions tied to agricultural thresholds
- Cash payout if predictions deviate beyond tolerance — partially offsetting weather-driven yield losses
Tier 3 — Agricultural Parametric Derivatives
Pay $100,000 if cumulative rainfall during the kharif season (June–September) falls below 600mm at the reference weather station.
Parametric agricultural derivatives have lower basis risk when combined with satellite ground truth (SatSure soil moisture data provides direct verification of water availability at the field level).
SatSure Advantage
SatSure's Sparta platform was built primarily for agricultural applications. The Layer 1 data advantage is strongest in this sector:
- Farm-level soil moisture — daily, high spatial resolution
- Vegetation indices (NDVI) — crop health monitoring
- Cropland data layers — land use classification
- Climate data — satellite-derived weather observations
This data both improves the engine's calibration for agricultural weather variables and provides independent verification for warranty and derivative settlement.
Target Markets
- India — 140M+ farming households, monsoon-dependent agriculture, growing parametric insurance market
- East Africa — rain-fed agriculture, drought vulnerability, existing index insurance programmes
- Southeast Asia — rice cultivation weather risk, typhoon exposure