Agri Business Consulting Group: Visualizing Agricultural Losses from a Bird's Eye View

The utility of drones, in the current day and age, transcends the functionality of ‘a camera on a stick,’ particularly in the genre of aerial photography. These unmanned aerial vehicles can also serve as data aggregation tools, assisting experts to quantify losses in the face of a crisis. The search for such drone technology applications ends with Agri Business Consulting Group, a company based in Brisbane, Australia that leverages the sophistication of a DJI fleet of drones to help farmers and insurers deal withloss quantification.

“Our focus has always been on achieving the best loss quantification to ensure that a farmer is properly compensated and an insurer does not overpay the loss. Those twin objectives equate to product sustainability, which is in everyone’s best interests,” begins Brent Demnar, managing director of Agri Business Consulting Group. The company firmly abides by the mantra, ‘adapt, adopt, and evolve’ in harnessing the potential of best-of-breed technologies for loss investigation and loss measurement. This philosophy has been a game changer for the companyin Australia, helping them utilize the sophistication of drones to achieve greater transparency in loss quantification, by efficiently and effectively delivering both real time and multispectral aerial imagery and analysis.

Agri Business Consulting Group stands out as the first independent loss adjusting company in the Asia Pacific region utilizing drones in the assessment of losses in agriculture. “Not so long ago, the tools available for loss quantification, apart from experience, were tape measures, cameras, and note pads. It’s a totally different world today; we have access to high res satellite imagery, handheld GPS, drone sourced NDVI imagery and analysis tools, portable threshing machines, and a variety of mobile applications to facilitate the task of crop loss investigation and assessment,” explains Demnar. The advantages of UAVs translates into a more objective basis for insurance claim determinations, as the aerial imagery and associated analysis allows us to more accurately measure the damage to crops, establish or confirm cause and recommend suitable indemnification. “The value proposition, specifically in the agricultural claims arena, is that there is a real point of difference for insurers between those professional loss adjusters using drones as an integral part of their service and those who do not.”

The use of drones can also play a vital role in monitoring the health of crops after hail, frost, fire or even chemical related loss events while also delivering a more thorough assessment of damage in forestry plantations as a result of fire, high winds or landslides. Through the use of historical images from various satellite platforms, the company leverages its DJI fleet of drones to offer unmatched comparisons of before and after crop analysis. Agri Business Consulting Group has also partnered with businesses such as Sentera in the USA to trial emerging drone specific technologies. Currently, the company boasts a fleet of 28 DJI Phantom 4s that enable efficient, effective, and objective data acquisition and analysis with greater transparency. “To ensure we keep abreast of developments in this sector, our general manager David Ward, who is also our chief agronomist, has also been a frequent attendee at international drone conferences in the US,” adds Demnar.

Agri Business Consulting Group has established itself as a constant agent of change in the agricultural loss adjusting sector by being an early adopter of any technology that allows it to perform its vital role more effectively, for the benefit of Insurers and farmers alike. “The essential contribution of drones to the end result makes them invaluable. It’s this realization, born through our many years of experience, that sets us apart,” concludes Demnar.