Drought hands agriculture the bill: at least 19 million in damage

The months without rain are starting to turn into figures. Swiss Hail, the farming sector's insurer against weather risks, puts this year's drought damage at no less than 19 million francs. The estimate is provisional, calculated as of 6 August, and the insurer warns that it will climb if dry conditions continue.

About 2,350 farms hold a policy covering drought. Roughly 1,100 of them have already filed a claim, close to one in two. A definitive tally is not possible yet, because several crops are still in the fields and only the harvest will show later how much was really lost.

Summer crops are suffering most. Potatoes, maize, sugar beet and sunflowers are among the plants hit disproportionately: they need water in exactly the months when it was missing this year. For some farms the losses are substantial.

A young form of cover

Drought insurance is a recent instrument, and the Confederation is helping it spread. Since 2023, premiums for frost and drought policies have been subsidised by 30 per cent. In the programme's first year around 2,500 farms signed up; for this year Swiss Hail expects growth of about ten per cent.

The mechanism says something about how farming risk is changing. Until recently hail was the hazard people insured against almost by instinct, because it arrives in minutes and is visible straight away. Drought works the other way round: it builds up over weeks, leaves no single moment to record, and is therefore harder to write into a policy and to compensate.

The question of who pays for the rest remains open. Insurance covers only the farms that bought it, and the 19 million announced refers to that perimeter, not to the sector's total losses. Those without cover face the summer on their own resources, between costlier irrigation, feed to buy and winter stocks already broken into.

The forecasts, meanwhile, announce no change of regime. The insurer speaks explicitly of unfavourable prospects, and with them of the possibility that today's figure is only a waypoint.