Livestock mortality insurance
Cover for the death or forced slaughter of farm animals following an accident or disease; it generally excludes major epizootics, whose compensation falls to the state and animal health funds.
A farm concentrates significant value in live animals: a dairy herd, valuable breeding stock, poultry, pigs. Livestock mortality insurance pays for the loss of these animals when they die or must be slaughtered following an accident, poisoning, fire, lightning, suffocation from a ventilation failure in an indoor unit, or an individual disease. It is priced by species, declared value and farming conditions, and requires prevention measures, inspected electrical installations, alarms, backup generators. The market's limit lies in major epizootics, avian influenza, foot-and-mouth disease, African swine fever, lumpy skin disease: a single disease can hit thousands of farms in a region, with culls ordered by the authorities. This highly correlated risk cannot be insured by the market alone. It is borne mainly by the state, which compensates animals culled by order, and by animal health mutual funds fed by farmers. Private insurance steps in as a complement, especially for business interruption linked to restrictions, where policies provide for it. The product illustrates a recurring boundary: what is individual is insured, what is systemic is pooled publicly.
Textbook case: a night-time power failure stops ventilation in a 20,000-chicken house; the alarm fails and half the birds die. The mortality insurance pays the loss, but notes that the backup generator had not been tested for a year, which reduces the indemnity under the policy terms.
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