Services

At Watts and Associates, we provide a variety of services to help agricultural leaders make better risk management decisions.

Crop Insurance Division

Our diverse team of specialists bring perspective and experience from every corner of North American Agriculture. We’ve developed crop insurance products for crops from Apples to Zucchini, and created programs to insure losses to yield, price, revenue, or margin, on an individual, area, or index basis. Our skilled data scientists are deeply familiar with the special challenges that come with quantifying agricultural risk with imperfect information and a rapidly changing production environment. From private supplemental offerings to the foundational policy and framework designs that underpin national crop insurance programs, W&A’s seasoned team of experts are standing by to assist.

Data Science for Agriculture

Whether you are designing new programs, anticipating grower choices, or testing new ideas, a strong quantitative assessment is invaluable. W&A’s team of experienced data scientists have large volumes of production, market pricing, planted acreage, and insurance performance data at their fingertips. These data (and more as applicable to the specific client) are leveraged using data science techniques to create backcasts, simulate and project future performance, and provide insight into favorable risks and markets.

Software Tool Development

While W&A specializes in using economic and statistical tools to drive creation of new and improved agricultural policy or program designs, the outcomes of these projects can be complicated and lean on truly massive volumes of data. Software tools are necessary to translate the insights of data science into actionable information. Over the course of the last decade, W&A has created a suite of industry-leading web-based applications to link statistical analysis to graphs, charts, maps, and tables that clearly lay out the expected implications of various choices and support improved decision making. W&A’s team of software architects and developers, quality control testers, and help desk staff build software from concept to full production implementation and continuous improvement. As the old saying goes ‘good production software is never finished, only adapted to solve the next problem.’

Crop Insurance Agent Training

Crop Insurance programs provide farmers and ranchers with critical tools to secure the financial futures of their operations. Through time, the increasing number of options, types of coverage, and trade-offs between crop insurance and government support programs have made crop insurance decisions very complex. Supporting farmer decision making is a full time job for an expert risk management professional. W&A’s team of crop insurance agent training staff dedicate themselves to continuously teaching these professionals about all that is new, changing, and on-the-horizon in the crop insurance space so agents can offer optimal value to the producers they serve. Whether it be through an intensive crop insurance academy, a day-long workshop, a half-day refresher course, weekly continuous education seminars, or an expanding library of online resources, W&A crop insurance agent training services help agents be more efficient and effective in helping farmers and ranchers make better risk management choices.