The Hardest Call in Crop Dusting Insurance

The hardest phone call in aerial application insurance is not the one about money.

Vaughn Tolbert spent over a decade on both sides of that business, first as an underwriter, then as a broker. Crop dusting is dangerous work. Pilots fly eight to ten feet off the ground, sometimes under power lines. "on average in the last decade, we've seen anywhere between 10 to 30 deaths per year on the main application side," he says. When one of those accidents happens, somebody has to pick up the phone.

"the hardest call you'll ever have to make is not when you lose business, it's when you have to call the wife of the insured," Tolbert says. The call is not really about the crash. It is about "how to move forward with their life after that."

That is what pushed him toward drones. "I've had zero of those calls since I opened VT," he says.

The opening came in 2021. Tolbert's brokerage had been bought by a large conglomerate that wanted to move him into a role he was not suited for. At the same time, the DJI T30 hit the market and ag drones stopped being a novelty. The established aerial application brokerages wanted no part of it. An air tractor policy ran sixty to seventy thousand dollars in premium. A single drone brought in three to six thousand. The math did not interest them.

Tolbert told his wife what he was thinking. "I think this is gonna be a good idea to try to make a go of this and be the drone guy in the insurance space. And lo and behold, it was right time, right place."

He had the background nobody else wanted to use. "I was literally the only experienced insurance provider who wanted to make this their primary focus," he says. Underwriters started calling him for help merging manned application policy language with the drone side. DJI asked him to write about ag drone insurance. The agency has doubled or tripled every year since it opened. Five years in, he insures roughly seventy percent of all legally flying ag drones in the country.

The word legally is doing real work in that sentence.

The FAA has spent a century regulating manned crop dusters. The rules were written for airplanes. Part 137 requires a pilot to wear a seatbelt and keep the registration in the glove box. A drone has no seatbelt and no glove box. Getting a legal exemption to fly commercially takes months. Meanwhile a farmer buys a drone in the spring and the spray window in North Dakota might be eight weeks long.

So people fly anyway. "We'll just have guys just say, I got a drone, I'm using it. Come get me if you think you can," Tolbert says.

That is the problem he actually works on. Education comes first. He built U-PASS, the Unmanned Pilot Association for Safety and Standards, so pilots have somewhere to learn the rules before they get in trouble. He launched a program called Farmitude that lets pilots operate legally under contract while their FAA paperwork works its way through the system. He pulls flight data from software providers through an API, so underwriters can see conditions, chemical, and spray date. Compliance earns discounts. Flying rogue gets harder.

Money is not the point for him. His aim is "to grow this industry and make it as professional as possible and have it as healthy as possible." Bad actors writing sloppy policies for a quick buck would sink the whole thing.

The economics help his case. A ground rig or a big tractor runs a quarter million to half a million dollars. "These drum kits are starting anywhere between 20 to $50,000. So the return on investment, just hearing that pure, tangible equity that you have in those pieces of equipment, is leaps and bounds better than what you're getting on those tractors," Tolbert says. Ground equipment also destroys three to five percent of the crop it drives across. Drones do not drive across anything.

The technology has a ceiling on it right now. The FCC issued a foreign drone ban on December 23, 2025. No new foreign-made models can enter the US market, though existing models can still be sold and flown. The practical effect is that American operators are working with December 2025 technology until domestic manufacturers catch up. China, India, and Hungary are ahead by a few years. Tolbert thinks the gap closes through hybrid systems, gas alongside batteries, fuel-powered motors alongside electric. Flight software and chips are not the constraint. Batteries and motors are.

He is also an equity partner in the American Drone Network, which launched this year and works like a ride-hailing app for ag drone jobs. Member pilots lease equipment from the network instead of putting a hundred thousand dollars into a truck, trailer, and drone. A farmer or co-op posts a job, a pilot claims it, and the network keeps that pilot inside the same training and compliance structure while they learn. It mirrors how manned application already works, where a farmer hires a contractor instead of buying an airplane.

When he pushed out a promotion for a new market recently, the response was immediate. "I'm getting blown up all over the place right now," he says. His producers had been complaining about getting only one lead a day.

He did not set out to corner a market. He set out to write policies that pay and keep pilots out of the ground. The phone call he no longer has to make is the measure that matters to him.

Process over pressure every time.