Recently, in the domestic practice of agricultural insurance, interest in index insurance products has increased from both insurers and insurants. This is due to the high efficiency demonstrated by them as a tool to protect against the risk of yield loss, with a low level of associated moral hazard, low maintenance costs of the insurance contract. Index insurance implies the conclusion of a contract providing for the payment of insurance compensation when the base indicator reaches a specified threshold, the base indicator being an indirect sign of the occurrence of actual damage. When insuring crops, such a baseline can be high temperatures, lack of precipitation during the growing season. However, a more accurate indicator of the magnitude of the crop, and hence its shortage, is the normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI), obtained using space monitoring of vegetation. This fact is a reliable prerequisite for the use of this indicator in the index insurance of agricultural crops. Mathematical modeling of the dependence of the yield of spring barley in certain districts of the Rostov region on NDVI indicators made it possible to determine the main parameters of the corresponding index insurance products and to prove the effectiveness of their use to reduce the risks of yield loss. In particular, efficiency is expressed in stabilizing the income of agricultural producers by years, which is confirmed by a decrease in the coefficients of variation of this indicator in some cases to 27%.