Farm insurance can be a quagmire of sub-clauses, legalese and bundled products that don’t always fit a farmer’s unique operation. First Acre Insurance wants to give Canadian farmers a different experience: insurance that’s custom-fit for their operations and that keeps them farming in the face of a loss.
If you have made an insurance claim only to find you’re not getting the full replacement value on that high-capacity auger, baler or whatever you lost, and paying more out of pocket to complete the claim, you’re not alone.
This is how co-insurance works, says Bonnie Kluthe, and it’s a huge bugbear – one of many – for farmers looking to properly insure their businesses, and insurance brokers looking to help them do that.
Kluthe, vice president, business development with First Acre Insurance, says that the insurance industry has not always kept up with the realities of 21st century farming and has been slowly failing this sector for years. She says this can leave farmers without a clear understanding of how much and what is actually covered on the physical things they need to farm, while also not recognizing that the way farms operate requires a wholly different approach to what’s insurable.
The frustration this caused was the impetus behind the creation of First Acre Insurance, a company with deep, boots-on-the-ground knowledge of modern farming that has built its insurance products accordingly.
“We’re all about farm,” says Kluthe. “It’s all we do and it’s all we’re ever going to do.”
Changing the face of farm insurance
“First Acre was started in 2021,” says Kluthe, who has been involved in farming her whole life. “We talked to farmers from Ontario to Alberta and thought we’d find a little gap in the market, but that’s totally not what we found.”
Indeed, they found a chasm between what farmers wanted and what they were able to get. “Then we talked to brokers who were struggling to insure farms,” she says. “They told us the system was broken.”
Kluthe says that a big reason why things got this way was because of a lack of data. Insurance is based on data, statistics and probabilities. While lots of data exists for personal or commercial risks because of the number of homes or businesses across the country, the number of farms is significantly less and more spread out. This means that agricultural data is less readily available and harder to define and prepare for, making agricultural risks more difficult to model and fully identify.
So Kluthe and her colleagues decided to use their ag and IT knowledge to develop farm insurance products that made sense for farms of all kinds (grain, vegetables, livestock, mixed, large, small, spread out, compact, you name it) and that brokers could confidently offer to their clients.
“We took the pain points from farmers and the pain points from brokers, and it took us three years to design insurance products that reflect how today’s farms operate,” she says.
One key factor is that First Acre is a Managing General Agent (MGA). MGAs have specialized expertise in specific sectors – in this case, agriculture – which they use to design insurance products that work for that sector, then find insurers who are willing to partner on those products. In other words, the insurers are not determining what policies will and won’t cover but are agreeing to follow the MGA’s expertise. And that’s important for an industry where not every farm operation is the same.
Giving choice back to brokers and farmers
Crystal Lanz, managing partner with Lakestone Insurance in Sylvan Lake, Alta., has been on the front lines of farm insurance for years. Having grown up on a mixed farm in Saskatchewan, she has seen first-hand how farms have changed – they’re bigger, both in terms of acreage and equipment size, use more tech, are more industrialized and more diversified. “The needs change, so understanding the risks needs to change too.”
From her perspective, First Acre Insurance is exactly what brokers like her have been wanting to see for years. “The way First Acre has rolled out their products – they look at ag through a different lens,” she says. “The level of customization is truly distinctive. Their digital platform is highly intuitive, allowing brokers to easily access products and tailor them to suit the specific needs of our clients.”
Kluthe says that First Acre has worked hard to make the insurance process quicker, easier and clearer for farmers and brokers. That means using plain language, leveraging technology and bringing much needed clarity to insurance policies – including getting rid of that co-insurance problem.
For instance, First Acre insures all agriculture and commercial property on “agreed value”. Essentially, this means that a farmer and their First Acre broker partner agree on the value of a combine or building (or whatever is being insured) and that’s what gets paid out in the event of a total loss. It eliminates that co-insurance bugbear, and First Acre is the only farm insurer doing it. “Agreed value is a significant selling point,” says Lanz. “It eliminates uncertainty, providing farmers with clarity and assurance about the compensation they’ll receive in the event of a total loss.”
It’s just one way First Acre acknowledges the realities of modern farming and what a loss of any kind means to a farm business. Others include seasonal coverage, digital site mapping so farmers can choose what they want included on a policy and what they don’t, absolute flexibility to adapt policies to fit specific needs, wellness and legal advice included in every policy, real-time machinery valuations, the ability to cover very large, multi-location farms under one policy, loss of use and equipment breakdown coverage and much more.
Kluthe says everything First Acre does is aimed at keeping farmers farming when something goes wrong, which is something Lanz deeply appreciates: “Their goal is to get that farmer back to work as fast as possible with as little pain as possible.”
To check out First Acre’s coverage options or find a local broker, visit firstacre.ca. First Acre Insurance will be at Ag in Motion with one of their broker partners, Block’s Agencies, from July 15 to 17, 2025 at Booth #SB41 in the Scotiabank Pavillion.
