Watts and Associates, Inc. (W&A) and TerraMetrics Agriculture, Inc. (TMAI) have proposed development of a new insurance plan for the Risk Management Agency (RMA) for rangeland, pastureland, and dryland hay. The program is intended to retain the administrative and moral hazard effectiveness of a county level Group Risk Plan (GRP) product while substantially increasing correlation with farm level perils by insuring perils at a sub-county level. The proposed methods to be employed involve the development of an insurable sub-county satellite remote sensing index. The product is being designed to capture the risk associated with perils occurring at the sub-county level, avoid moral hazard and adverse selection, and continue to be actuarially sound. In addition to the remote sensing index, a proxy index (a substituted crop or weather variable that has measurable yields or quantities that are used as a proxy for range production) will be developed at the county level. The remote sensing index at the sub-county level and the proxy index at the county level, if approved by the FCIC Board, will then be deployed as a dual trigger product, whereby the producer is paid the largest indemnity payment indicated by the dual trigger. The development effort is staged for testing initially in western rangeland region and then moved to the more seasonally complex and fractionated pastureland in the east.
W&A realizes farm level data associated with range production (similar to Actual Production History (APH) data) are largely nonexistent, even though satellite imagery is available nationwide. To enforce best management practices, many agencies have attempted to monitor animal days of grazing to enforce federal grazing leases. For an insurance plan to be successful, poor management practices such as overgrazing must be excluded as an insured cause of loss. Any plan based on agency or farm level verification of grazing pressure will be fraught with information asymmetries leading to insurmountable actuarial and underwriting problems. We are developing a plan that is not dependant on individual producer management strategies or potential hidden action. The use of satellite remote sensing to determine rangeland productivity at the sub-county level obviates the need to monitor individual producer actions.