Removing the emotion from risk management decisions

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Studies have shown that humans aren’t always great at perceiving and managing risk. This includes a variety of risks including price risk in the crop marketing process. Farmers Risk CEO Dakota Hoben says that their platform can help to reduce the influence of human bias on these important decisions.

Hoben… “You hear some of these grain marketing consultants and folks who just say, you know, the best risk managers are the farmer's significant other, whoever that may be, who's not growing that crop because they don't have any emotional tie to the crop, and they can make very much calculated kind of black and white decisions. And so I think, well, how we think about that at Farmers Risk is how can we introduce those types of support systems to farmers over time? And so it does take a little bit of the relinquishing control from farmers, but I think that's relatively easy to do if you can just prove out the benefit, right? I mean, it's not that much different from farmers relinquishing control of their steering wheels because auto steer proved to be more valuable. So in a similar sense, I think there is a little bit of we need to get farmers to relinquish a little bit of control over that grain marking and risk management steering wheel. But we gotta do the work and put the data in front of them to prove out kind of what that looks like and why this can be a better performer for them over time.”

Building that level of trust with farmers will be important for the young company to continue to gain traction.