Dr. Joachim Herbold
Senior Underwriter - Agro
Munich Re
Germany

Biography
Joachim Herbold joined the company in 1993 and has worked as an agricultural risk specialist and underwriter on different continents and markets. He previously worked in greenhouse production research at Hohenheim University, Stuttgart, Germany and as the manager of a greenhouse operation in Spain. He is an agricultural economist and holds a PhD in agricultural sciences from Hohenheim University. Articles about various aspects of agricultural insurance were published by him.

Abstract
Remote sensing: a suitable technology for crop insurance?

In spite of considerable technical progress over the past years, remote sensing (RS) technology has found little use in crop insurance practices. Application of RS is essentially restricted to georeferencing of agricultural plots, the insurance of grassland with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and RS-based flood monitoring to obtain a preliminary rough estimate of crop damage. Classifying crop types cultivated on the plots and determining yields have proved to be far more complex and difficult than initially assumed. There are still no solutions that are viable in practice. Crop growth models which use satellite and other data as input factors in determining yields might remedy the situation. The NDVI that is frequently used for measuring biomass shows only a low level of correlation to yield when applied to arable crops subjected to special weather conditions (e.g. dryness in the flowering period). Other developments likely to lead to more widespread use of RS in crop insurance include radar data, which are more suitable for agricultural uses, improved data interpretations and new analysis methods for large data volumes.