- Hail, frost, but especially drought affected Swiss fields, nurseries, fruit and wine this summer, as the Swiss Hagel insurance company announced.
- The largest insurance company for agricultural crops estimates the damage at around CHF 40 million.
- The fields in western Switzerland in particular have suffered.
The largest Swiss insurance company for agricultural crops was expecting 8,960 damage reports by the end of August 2022. “The damage due to drought alone should amount to 10 million,” said director Adrian Aebi at a media conference in Zurich.
In addition to the drought, the frost damage in spring and hail damage in June were particularly bad, said Aebi. Western Switzerland (Vaud, Jura, Geneva) was particularly affected, but also the cantons of Bern, Zurich, Basel-Landschaft, Lucerne and Solothurn. In some cases, for example, there were crop failures of up to 70 percent for corn.
No comparison to the horror year 2021
However, the numbers dip compared to 2021, which is seen as the worst year in the insurer’s history. Last year there were 14,000 damage reports, the total amounted to over 100 million francs.
The insurance company focused this year on the conspicuous drought. After the dry summer of 2018, farmers’ demand for insurance increased sharply due to excessive or no rainfall. In the meantime, around 15 percent of the arable land is insured because of drought, said those responsible for Schweizer Hagel.
Swiss hail insures the agricultural crops of around 30,000 Swiss farms with an equivalent value of around CHF 2 billion.