Blog Post

Rooted in Resilience: Part 1

by Global Ag Risk Solutions

15 Years Strong!

What It Took to Compete with Government-Subsidized Crop Insurance—and Win

Fifteen years ago, Global Ag Risk Solutions (GARS) took a bet on something most thought impossible.

We weren’t just launching a business—we were challenging an institution.

We set out to build a private-sector solution that would go head-to-head with one of the most entrenched and heavily subsidized systems in Canadian agriculture: government-backed crop insurance and AgriStability.

The odds? Let’s be honest—on paper, they weren’t great. Competing with a program backed by the federal and provincial governments (with its 60%+ premium subsidies, administrative cost support, and near-guaranteed risk pooling) seemed like an uphill battle.

But we believed something the status quo didn’t:

Farmers deserved better.

That belief has carried us through fifteen years of volatility, weather disasters, commodity shocks, and global pandemics. It’s helped us win the trust of producers who wanted a solution built for them, not just administered to them.

Today, we’re proud to reflect on the journey—what we’ve learned, how we’ve endured, and what we see coming over the next 15 years.

The Start: We Put Producers First

In 2011, the agricultural landscape in Western Canada was grappling with more than just weather extremes.

Farms were growing in size and sophistication. Financial management practices were evolving. Markets were volatile, and government programs remained rigid. Designed for a different generation of farms, programs like AgriStability and Crop Insurance didn’t reflect the scale, speed, or business complexity of modern operations.

Many farms were being underserved with “one-size-fits-all” solutions.

So we decided to ask a simple question: What if we built a product that didn’t just pay when yields dropped, but protected the bottom line?

We went to the drawing board, and not just with spreadsheets—we met with farmers at their kitchen tables, coffee shops, and community halls across the Prairies.

In those conversations, we heard the same themes repeated:

• “It doesn’t matter what the program says my margin was last year—my farm isn’t the same anymore.”
• “I don’t have time to fill out a dozen forms to maybe get a payment two years from now.”
• “I want protection that actually reflects how I make money.”

So we built something different.

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