The Department of Agriculture (DA) through attached unit Planters Products Inc. signed a memorandum of agreement with Satsure AG to provide better crop insurance using satellite technology.
The project, with the initial funding support of P5 million, targets to provide satellite imaging for 100,000 hectares planted with rice and 40,000 hectares planted with various crops within six months and will be piloted in Nueva Ecija, Iloilo and North Cotabato.
“This partnership between PPI and Satsure AG…will help in our ongoing efforts to provide our farmers with direct and targeted assistance to improve their productivity,” said DA Secretary William Dar.
Dar said in a statement this will also help the government in improving its disaster response, particularly on risk insurance as it will also upgrade crop monitoring.
“The traditional source of information which relies heavily on fieldwork will be insufficient in the country. As we modernize our agriculture sector, we must continuously explore for relevant technology to increase sufficiency and productivity,” Dar said.
Satsure AG is a developer based in Switzerland whose works include remote sensing satellite and other sensing sources to monitor agricultural crop portfolio and estimate agriculture yields with the objective of enabling better risk management and improve crop insurance and agriculture lending to farmers.