Using a system called weather-indexed insurance, farmers can insure their livestock with help from NASA satellite imagery.
If you’re a farmer in northern Kenya, your cash cow is—well, your cow. Livestock can provide families with milk, meat, and the income necessary to sustain a humble, yet happy, lifestyle. Your animals can be used as collateral to obtain credit, which can help you build your business. They can be bartered for needed goods. In a cash-poor society, your animals can pave the path to success. So if there is a drought in your area, and your cattle die, the results can be catastrophic.
But thanks to NASA’s satellite technology, farmers now have the chance to purchase insurance to make sure that one bad season won’t ruin their families.
It’s long been clear that Kenyan farmers needed some way to insure their livestock, but because of the distances between farms, standard insurance was highly impractical. So several years ago, the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi came up with an innovative high-tech plan to help Kenyan farmers mitigate their livestock risks: weather-indexed insurance.
The index tracks NASA’s satellite images of the Kenyan plains to measure the greenness of the ground from above. Because livestock eat the grass, “it’s a very good predictor for us of ... the nutrition available for livestock,” Andrew Mude of the ILRI told the Christian Science Monitor.
ILRI is working on pilot programs of the new weather-indexed insurance system now, and are charging farmers about $10 a year to insure a cow. If the weather index falls below a certain standard, farmers will be able to collect $200 for each insured cow. The organization expects that about half of the farmers in the pilot area will insure their cattle this year—and although the system is high-tech, it’s not as foreign to the farmers as you might think.
“These are populations who understand the stars very well, who use the stars to help them guide their movements and so on,” said Mude. “And so they are very aware that there are stars that move around at night – what they call ‘stars,’ in quotes – that are different from permanent stars. We let them know these moving stars are satellites taking pictures.”