When rural insurance distribution falters, the effects ripple far beyond coverage gaps. For Brent Walker (pictured), the answer to that breakdown started in the bleachers at horse shows, trading insights with the CEO of a crop insurance AIP.
“We had this idea that we could help the rural ag community find P&C solutions that were being kind of mishandled or just absent,” Walker said. That idea became Ag Brokerage Solutions.
Walker, now chief brokerage officer at Ag Brokerage Solutions under the Farmers Mutual Hail (FMH) umbrella, co-founded the firm in 2021 to address what he saw as a widening void in agricultural insurance distribution. “We built Ag Brokerage Solutions from the ground up. We just celebrated our two-year anniversary,” he said.
The firm began with admitted products – unusual in the wholesale space – before expanding into excess and surplus lines and higher-complexity risks. That rapid growth, Walker said, came down to a mix of geography, timing, and brand strength. “I think my background, where we’re located geographically, the FMH brand – all of those things kind of come together,” he said.
But while securing carrier contracts wasn’t a hurdle, keeping up with the demand was.
The core challenge Walker sees is clear: industry consolidation is stripping away local expertise.
“You do lose local knowledge, local expertise, even to some degree, relationships that have existed for generations in some of these communities,” he said. “From an underwriting standpoint, I think that you do start to deteriorate underwriting results when you don’t really know what that farm does.”
Walker said that small agencies are being dropped for failing to hit production targets. “They have an appointment with carrier XYZ, and because they couldn’t get to a half a million in premium, the carrier pulled their contract,” he said.
The result? A market awash in product, but devoid of context. “Everyone gets impacted, because results are impacted, and that causes rates to go up,” he said.
Rural risk profiles vary sharply depending on region and ownership models. “Are you in an area of the country where it’s just a lot of mom and pop, generational farms? Or are you in an area where it’s more corporate commercial agriculture that you can kind of get by with traditional producers?” Walker said.
As farming becomes more corporatized, the complexity of risks grows – but Walker doesn’t believe policy forms are the problem. “The products will continue to evolve with the growing changes in the agriculture space,” he said. “The explosion of the program space in the last five to even maybe 10 years has really filled in a lot of the gaps.”
Underwriting, however, hasn’t kept up. “We see requests for building values between $15 million and $100 million,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of carriers interested in those buildings if they’re agriculture occupants.”
Even common claims, like fires in cotton gins, present underwriting challenges. “Cotton gins catch fire,” Walker said. “It’s more about, how do you underwrite forward? Do they have the fire extinguishers? Do they have the fire suppression tools in place to handle it when it happens?”
Drone technology is rapidly becoming standard for pesticide delivery. “We get two to five requests a day for drones,” Walker said, noting that policies often require stitching together aerospace and environmental coverage.
But it’s not just product innovation that’s strained. Underwriting talent itself is inconsistent. “We see a lot of differentiation between underwriters in how much they know, how much they understand, what they can be comfortable with,” he said.
For Walker, the answer isn’t more consolidation – it’s smarter aggregation. “We actually believe the solution is through the creation of a farm and ag centric aggregator, where you can keep the local agency expertise local,” he said.
Unlike traditional aggregators focused on large commercial premiums, Walker’s model centers the underserved. “They don’t get super excited about a $15,000 farm premium or a $5,000 equine mortality policy, but that’s really what excites us,” he said.
Ag Brokerage Solutions’ goal is to scale local agencies without absorbing them. “We think that we’ll be able to connect all these small rural American agencies and give them the scale and power to be able to grow by keeping them local instead of making an acquisition and taking it from them,” he said.
As rural agri-insurance continues to evolve, Walker’s vision is less about reinventing the product – and more about keeping the right people in the room.
