While Silicon Valley veteran Bill Veghte has spent much of his career working for tech companies like Microsoft, HP, and SurveyMonkey, he never lost sight of his roots growing up on a farm in Northern New Hampshire. Along with his business partners, Veghte is taking that passion for agriculture and his background in technology into his new venture SAGE, which is using AI to assess field-level risk making it possible to tailor crop insurance coverage for farmers.
SAGE – which stands for Soil Analytics Geospatial Engine – is an agricultural risk intelligence company that takes public and private data, including satellite data, soil information, and scientific papers, to assess farming risk and calculate a precise amount of coverage a grower needs, Veghte told AgNavigator.
Historically, crop insurance is determined by countywide averages, which can obfuscate the risk associated with a specific farm, resulting in growers paying more for insurance than they need, Veghte explained. AI can change that dynamic by calculating risk at the field-level, while speeding up the process to obtain that farming data, he added.
“In previous generations, we had to put something in a very structured database. We spent enormous amounts of effort taking all these different types of data and trying to put it into something that we could query — a relational database, a spreadsheet. AI changed that,” Veghte said. “Sage has built a deeply contextualized set of AI models that combine the observation and understanding of soil, water, weather, and human interaction to drive specific outcomes and the resulting risks.”
Additionally, the agriculture industry is going to need ways to re-assess risk and what and how to grow amid a host of changing market conditions, including the return of El Niño conditions and ongoing input volatility, Veghte said.
“We’re going to have to re-answer what we grow where, given shifting weather patterns, degrading soils, rising input costs, and more volatile markets. And this repricing, in my opinion, will impact every stakeholder from farmers to governments to food companies to consumers, not just in the U.S. but internationally,” he elaborated.
SAGE launches with Aon, AgriCap partnership
SAGE also revealed a partnership with professional service firm Aon and specialty agricultural insurance provider AgriCap to offer “precision crop insurance” to corn and soybean growers in 15 states in 2027.
The companies are starting with a four-county pilot developed in conjunction with Resilience in Agricultural Lending and Insurance Coalition (RALIC) and with funding from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. The pilot will span more than one million acres of farmland or roughly 12% of Michigan’s agricultural production
“The opportunity is to translate what is happening on the land into risk signals that the insurance market can understand and act on. When we make resilience visible, it becomes underwritable. And if we can make it underwritable, we can syndicate capital behind it,” Jonathan Sherrill, senior VP of Aon’s Agriculture Resilience Center, said in a press release.
Crop insurance’s role in promoting regen ag
SAGE is not just built on Veghte’s deep technology and farming expertise but also draws from Robert Bonnie’s years of work in the public sector with the USDA. Bonnie worked for the USDA for more than a decade in various roles under both the Obama and Biden administration.
“One of the things we tried to do during the Biden administration was actually create incentives within crop insurance to reward growers that used practices like no-till cover crops that are known to reduce the yield volatility of crops. That is, they increase the resilience of those croplands. There’s a lot of interest in that — has been for a long time. The reason we weren’t able to do it was because, in order to do it, we needed to be able to look at risk on a field-by-field basis,” Bonnie elaborated.
Crop insurance has become a vital tool for farmers to manage risk and provide financial support. Roughly 90% of corn and soybean growers use crop insurance, and many farmers are required to first secure crop insurance before getting a bank loan, Bonnie noted.
“In the last 15 years, crop insurance has really become the dominant safety net tool of the farm bill, so significant resources annually, anywhere from $14-20 billion annually that the U.S. taxpayer is providing to subsidize crop insurance. It’s very popular. It’s worked really well,” Bonnie added.
