173 In marginal years when there’s too much rain, not enough, or calamity strikes, US farmers and ranchers rely on insurance from the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation to buffer them from catastrophe. Crop insurance is the largest farm safety net, covering over $207 billion in liability in 2023. Most farmers file justified losses, but occasionally there are fraudulent claims—schemes rooted out by modern crop monitoring. Investigators with the USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA) use highresolution aerial imagery to capture field conditions, machine learning algorithms to automate the detection of patterns, and GIS technology to ground truth claims. This integration of advanced technologies and data science techniques supports the investigative process that generates positive results—like exposing the Colorado ranchers who were caught tampering with rain gauges, the Kentucky tobacco farmers who were found to have falsely reported hail damage, and the North Carolina farmer who produced crops that were sold in the names of others and reported as lost to natural disasters. Although it’s only a small number of farmers and ranchers who look for ways to game the system, the financial savings of rejected claims adds up. “We’ve been able to document a cost avoidance through our Spot Check List program that amounts to more than $1.75 billion over the past 20-plus years,” said Jim Hipple, a physical scientist in the Business Analytics Division of USDA RMA. “Cost avoidance is even better than cost recovery because we haven’t paid anything out, so we don’t have that added burden of trying to pull money back.” The work by Hipple and others at the Risk Management Agency also helps instill trust in the crop insurance system—an important buffer that protects farmers from major losses due to drought, excessive rain, hail, wind, frost, insects, and disease. Federal Crop Insurance Program Gains a Game-Changing Geospatial Awareness Operating Farms and Timberlands More Efficiently
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