Optimum

Optimum: Solving for Your Goals

Data-Driven Decision Making

From a buyer’s standpoint, you want to spend your insurance dollars on some combination of threats that have high odds of happening and those with odds of having a big impact on your business if they happen.

Until now, most farmers’ decisions around crop insurance were based on a “gut feeling” or weather events that stuck in their minds. Now, with Optimum, events have been quantified. Through a robust simulation process, producers can see how today’s insurance choices perform.

rolling green field that stretches for miles with strip of trees to one side

Optimum: Reviewing Your Options

We can ask our proprietary Optimum tool to analyze federal insurance policies to find the best choice whatever your risk management goal.

Behind the calculations are thousands of data points for commodity prices, yields, volatility, etc. Customer data are used to generate customized solutions; county data are used for demonstration purposes.

For instance, we worked with one farmer and found that by changing his coverage and plans, he was able to quickly see a colored matrix showing the decision would remove all the likely yield/price combinations that would result in red ink for his operation at a very modest added cost.

Insight into the impacts of crop management decisions are a bonus. One South Dakota farmer, for example, looked at the chart of his yields vs. the county yield and immediately remarked he could see the result of each of the cropping improvements he had made during the past 10 years, validating those changes were effective in increasing his yields.

In the sample chart image, green indicates profit for that yield and price level; red indicates losses per acre. The darker the color, the more likely that outcome is.