If there’s one lesson that every farmer has learned, it’s that what Mother Nature gives with one hand, she often takes away with the other. Sun and rain are what make it possible to grow crops, but the droughts and floods that have become more prevalent over the last several decades have often made Mother Nature as much of a nemesis as a benefactor for growers. In fact, during the last 25 years, the incidence of extreme weather has increased nearly 260 percent, while average crop failure rates in the 2000s have jumped 69 percent from what they were in the 1970s.

All of this has given rise to a new phenomenon: weather insurance. Different than federal crop insurance, weather insurance doesn’t pay out based on crop loss or reduced yield – it simply pays out based on the occurrence of bad weather events. Growers can go online, enter information about their location, the crops they’re growing, and the weather conditions they’re trying to guard against, and if those weather conditions materialize, payout from the insurance company is automatic. There are no claims to file and no haggling with an adjustor.

The market for weather insurance is young, but evolving quickly. WeatherBill is one of the companies pioneering the market, having recently introduced a product it calls Total Weather Insurance (TWI).

“The concept behind Total Weather Insurance,” said David Friedberg, CEO of WeatherBill, “is to give growers a way to ensure they will be profitable – regardless of the weather – and to do so in a way that is easy and works the way farmers need it to.”

The WeatherBill Total Weather Insurance product works by supplementing the coverage that farmers can get from the federal crop insurance program. Due to the structure of the federal crop program, which covers growers for only a portion of their proven historical yields, a grower often must suffer a near-catastrophic yield loss before the federal program will start providing coverage benefits. By comparison, Total Weather Insurance pays farmers for weather events that lead to even moderate yield losses and also provides farmers supplemental payments in years where the federal program does kick in but doesn’t provide enough coverage to make a farmer whole.

Friedberg, who started his career as a U.C. Berkeley astrophysicist and later was a founding member of Google’s corporate development team, has already seen significant traction for WeatherBill’s products, with thousands of policyholders, and the recent announcement that Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) would be making Total Weather Insurance available through its network of ADM Crop Risk Services agents.

TWI is available exclusively through qualified crop insurance agents, including ADM Crop Risk Services whose network of agents have made TWI available for the 2011 crop year. The deadline to enroll at http://www.weatherbill.com is March 15.