Agriculture Insurance Platform & Product Design | GARS

$500+ Million

In claims paid to farmers

Acquired

by HUB international (18,000+ employees)

100+

Unique data points used in the underwriting model to evaluate farm risk

20,000

Farm-Years of geo-referenced farm financial and yield data

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What we’re building. What we’d bet on next.

Insight

Insurance that knows you're a good farmer

Crop insurance is one of the last corners of agriculture that got away with being simple. Set a price, set a threshold, and if the yield drops below it, write a cheque. Put two operators on the same land, same crop, same weather, and they won't produce the same revenue. One knows when to push, when to hold back, when to chase yield. The other doesn't. Traditional products treat them identically. For an industry built on precision, on reading soil and weather and markets with a lifetime of accumulated skill, the insurance that's supposed to protect all of that effort has been strangely indifferent to who's actually driving the tractor.

Global Ag Risk Solutions didn't accept the premise. They built insurance that actually knows you're a good farmer. Whole-farm coverage calibrated to the individual: what you spend, what you grow, how your land performs, how you've managed risk over time. The product protects profitability, not just yield. If commodity prices tank, the farmer is covered. If a crop is struggling and the instinct is to plow it under and take the claim, the answer is don't. Keep farming. Apply that next round of spray. The margin is protected regardless. That changes how farmers make decisions. During the commodity boom after Ukraine, GARS farmers chased yields that would have been catastrophic under traditional coverage. Some families built generational wealth in a single season because they had the coverage to go all in when the opportunity was there.

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“Insurance that actually knows you're a good farmer. The traditional model was built for a simpler time. That time is over. ”

Challenge

Spreadsheets don't scale

The product was real. The infrastructure behind it wasn't. GARS had built something remarkable on spreadsheets, manual document assembly, and a back-office operation held together by long hours and good people. Before you could quote a farmer, you needed five years of financials analyzed by hand, normalized manually, fed into an Excel calculator. The underwriting logic worked, but barely. Product options were limited. Scaling meant scaling headcount linearly. They needed infrastructure worthy of the innovation.

Ascent struck a deal where our success depended on theirs. Skin in the game. Innovators backing innovators.

We built a from-the-ground-up underwriting, data analysis, and policy management system for a product that didn't have a precedent. No blueprint, no reference architecture, no off-the-shelf anything. Two teams at the whiteboard for months, arguing about data models and system architecture, because farmers' livelihoods would run on whatever we built and nobody was interested in getting it wrong. Premium roughly doubled in the first year. Headcount didn't move.

Then we went deeper. We got so fluent in the GARS world that they brought us into their marketing. Explaining production cost insurance to farmers who've bought crop insurance the same way for three generations takes more than a brochure. It takes people who understand the product at the level of the people who designed it. One team, one goal. We designed the customer experience, shaped how the product was explained to farmers, and built the systems that delivered it.

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Evolution

From translating the vision to shaping it

GARS innovates aggressively. New products, new coverage structures, new ways to underwrite risk. That pace requires a partner who can move between actuarial logic, underwriting mechanics, product design, and product positioning without losing a step. If the product isn't ready when the air drills start rolling, it's another year before it hits the market.

AgWrap functions as three insurance products fused into one. Change the pricing on one element and it cascades through the other two. YieldPlus layers on top of provincial crop insurance and delivers full PCI benefits at reduced cost, but the pricing mechanics to make that work didn't exist. They had to be designed and built from scratch. These aren't products where you tweak a variable and ship it. Every coverage structure carries its own underwriting logic, its own actuarial assumptions, its own relationship to the farmer's entire operation.

Ascent and GARS worked in lockstep to bring each one to life in record time. You don't pull that off unless you know every detail of the company, its products, and the business logic that powers them.

Stakes

Seeding doesn't reschedule

Agriculture doesn't wait. Budgets were always tight, timelines always impossible. New products have become possible literally weeks before the sales cycle. A government decision at the 11th hour can greenlight something the teams have been keeping warm for months.

Great partnerships figure it out.

You define scope on the run. You make compromises together. You find a way forward when the plan stops matching the reality, because the season is coming whether you're ready or not. There are all-nighters every year building out the system for the season. Farmers pull all-nighters during seeding and harvest. We pull ours alongside them.

The underwriting model has evolved continuously across the partnership. It started with four core data points and five years of financial history. Today it incorporates township-level land data, crop rotation risk, yield indices, and over 100 individual variables per farm before a single calculation fires. The products evolve fast enough that having a partner with real domain expertise in the room is what keeps the foundation solid. Other MGAs see the platform and struggle to believe it exists. When we tell them how we did it and the economics, they hardly believe that either.

“Other MGAs see the platform and struggle to believe it exists. When we tell them how we did it and the economics, they hardly believe that either.”

Impact

Making the world take notice

What started as a spreadsheet became a 20,000 farm-year dataset and the engine behind half a billion dollars in claims paid to farmers. A product that the traditional insurance industry didn't know what to make of became one it couldn't ignore, and HUB International, one of the world's largest brokerages, made the move to acquire it. GARS continues to push the boundaries of what risk management can do for growers, backed by infrastructure that evolves as fast as the products demand.

The client built the innovation. We built the infrastructure to match it, then helped evolve both until the line between product and platform disappeared.

GARS farmers got insurance that finally recognized what they bring to the table. The ambition was never the problem. The product was never the problem. What was missing was a team that could make the technology and customer experience worthy of the vision. That's the impact that changes a company's trajectory.

Ready to move on something? We are.

Someone from our team will reach out within a day. No pitch, no deck — just a real conversation about what you're seeing and where the opportunity is.

Selected Field Notes

Cooperative & Retail

Federated Co-operatives Limited

Agriculture Technology

GroundTruth.Ag

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