In the world of Pasture, Rangeland, and Forage (PRF) insurance, performance isn’t just about indemnity checks — it’s about precision. A high-performing policy must align with a producer’s unique risk tolerance, land footprint, and operational goals. At Redd Summit Advisors, performance starts with smart software and is guided by deep agricultural insight.
Thad Truman, software engineer at Redd Summit, is the co-developer of Ranch Pro, the proprietary technology that powers Redd Summit’s policy-building engine. This software makes it possible to evaluate hundreds of thousands of PRF coverage options in seconds.
“The special sauce is basically determining which of those [policy combinations] are useful to explore and which parts you can confidently throw away,” Truman says. “We’re intelligently selecting areas of that search space to explore to figure out some aggressive policies that have good return, and some conservative ones that still offer strong numbers.”
While PRF coverage may look straightforward on paper, Truman says the sheer volume of scenarios for any significantly-sized ranch — which will typically span multiple rainfall grids — can be overwhelming.
“If you have four or five grids, there’s already too many scenarios to be able to calculate all of those in a reasonable amount of time,” he explains. “Our job is narrowing down billions of possibilities into the right handful of options.”
Choosing the Best Option
From that handful, how do you know which is the highest-performing PRF policy?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Truman emphasizes that a great policy isn’t just the one with the biggest average indemnity check — it has to fit the producer’s goals. “There’s no such thing as the best policy,” he explains. “There’s a range of policies for the risk appetite of the rancher.”
For example, one rancher might be comfortable concentrating coverage in just two intervals of the year, aiming for higher indemnity check. Another may prefer to spread risk more conservatively across five or six intervals. Location is also a huge factor.
To measure policy performance, Truman says his team generally analyzes a 20-year timeframe.
“We’re asking, ‘How would that policy have performed in the last 20 years? How many years would a rancher have actually paid out of pocket for the premium?’ You want to minimize that,” he says. “The inverse is what we call ‘winning years’ — when indemnities exceed the premium.”
Redd Summit’s software tracks net performance across those 20 years, how consistent indemnity checks have been, and how much volatility a policy might expose a producer to. “We have a couple in-house metrics that relate to how consistent the returns on the policy are. We assign a more favorable score based on how consistent those returns have been,” says Truman.
Technology doesn’t just help maximize indemnity checks — it also makes policies transparent. Truman warns that not all quotes are created equal. “A misconception we’ve seen is that people compare one number to another — like net indemnities — without seeing the full picture,” he says.
That’s why Redd Summit uses 15- and 20-year historical analysis in their software, rather than cherry-picking favorable five-year snapshots. “We feel like that’s a more honest view of how the policy would perform in this climate,” Truman says.
At the end of the day, every Redd Summit policy is designed to maximize indemnity checks to keep ranchers on the land.
“The fact that we can help them stay on the land is really meaningful,” Truman says.
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