Vol. 8, Issue 11 (2019)

Author(s):
Pragya, Mrinali Manohar and Swayam Vid

Abstract:
Crops are at greater risk in the changing climate in present era. Crop insurance plays crucial role in livelihood resilient agriculture as they provide better support to farmers under adverse conditions. Farmers in the developing world will be able to insure against harvest failure if robust insurance packages, based on a geophysical index rather than individual loss, become widely available. Remote Sensing Technology (RST) is the emerging technology with potential to offer plenty of supplementary, complimentary and value-added functions for crop insurance. Application areas of RST includes acreage estimation, crop health reports, yield modeling, reduction of sample size of CCEs, soil moisture determination (RADAR), rainfall estimates etc. However, RST also faces certain challenges due to heterogeneous croplands, data quality, poor identification of small crop areas, cloud coverage etc. Thus, RST for crop insurance requires further research along with greater cooperation between the insurance industry and the remote sensing community to help farmers minimizing their crop failure risks.