Now Irish farmers can insure their products as easily as insure their homes.

This can be done using a global platform based on hundreds of niche product indices approved by London's Lloyd's Ascot syndicate. Crop insurance has existed in the United States since the 1930s, but the government heavily subsidizes it to provide protection against production and price risk damage.

Similar schemes supported by the government are used in Canada and India. However, providing insurance in Ireland without such government support has proved challenging, even though price risk continues to rise due to many factors, including commodity market liberalization and climate change.

New insurance systems are made possible by recent advances in data science and lowering the cost of running the trillions of computer simulations needed to calculate the risks of a portfolio of commodity indices used by the developer of the Stable platform.

Stable is a British startup whose investors include the agrochemical company Syngenta, an investor in the seed phase Anthemis Group and the Swiss insurance company Baloise Group, as well as Ascot.

A new crop insurance platform is currently available to farmers in the UK, France, Russia, South Africa, Poland, the Netherlands, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Brazil, Uruguay, Sweden, Croatia, Portugal and Spain.