New precision crop insurance program for corn and soybean growers to expand across 15 states for the 2027 crop year
CHICAGO and MENLO PARK, Calif., Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Aon plc (NYSE:AON), a leading global professional services firm, and SAGE, an AI-native agricultural risk intelligence company, today announced the launch of a new precision crop insurance program in the U.S. to assess agricultural risk more accurately and help price insurance more effectively.
In collaboration with AgriCap, a specialty agricultural insurance provider, the program will be available to corn and soybean growers in 15 states for the 2027 crop year. The coverage is designed to complement federal crop insurance by more precisely matching coverage to the value being protected and the underlying risk at the field level.
Federal crop insurance which covers nearly 90 percent of U.S. corn and soybean acreage1, is priced on the average risk in each county, even though risk varies widely from field to field, leaving many growers paying premiums that may not reflect their individual risk.
The new program is being tested through a four-county pilot developed by the Resilience in Agricultural Lending and Insurance Coalition (RALIC), with funding provided in part from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. The pilot encompasses more than one million agricultural acres, representing approximately 12 percent of Michigan farmland.2,3
Aon brings leading Risk Capital data and analytics, capabilities and expertise to translate SAGE’s insights into insurance solutions and connects those solutions with the capital needed to support them.
“With this new approach, we can translate what is happening on the land into risk signals that the insurance market can understand and act upon,” said Jonathan Sherrill, Senior Vice President, Agriculture Resilience Center, Aon. “When we make resilience visible, it can be underwritten, which means we can syndicate capital behind it.”
SAGE has built deeply contextualized AI models that combine the observation and understanding of soil, water, weather and human interaction. By combining these complex data sets that historically could not be analyzed together at scale, patterns of risk and resilience can be understood that were previously difficult or impossible to identify.
“Farmers have understood that every field is different, but the ability of the USDA and the insurance industry to understand those differences at scale has been a significant obstacle,” said Bill Veghte, CEO and Co-Founder, SAGE. “The SAGE AI engine brings together billions of datapoints together in a way that simply wasn’t feasible before advancements in AI, creating a much clearer picture of the factors influencing risk and resilience from the individual field to the entire U.S. corn belt.”