Alberta farm consultancy Agri-Trend will take its Agri-Data Solution farm management technology platform south of the border through a new venture with J.R. Simplot.
The two companies on Tuesday announced their joint venture company, U.S. Agri-Data Solutions, to deliver the web-based platform to farmers and processors across the U.S.
Agri-Trend, which also operates offices in Winnipeg and Calgary, has seen its fee-based data management platform used “extensively” in Canada for the past 10 years. It’s now been customized and tested for U.S. cropping systems and patterns for the past two growing seasons, the companies said in a joint release.
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The Agri-Data Solution allows growers to integrate all their data into one management system and transmit specific data to “key stakeholders” such as crop advisors, banks, processors and others who have a “vested interest in a particular crop or field,” the companies said.
The system can also be used by agricultural processors for contract compliance as well as to document “land-applied processed water” or a farm’s carbon sequestration activities for carbon offsets.
“In addition to data management, the Agri-Data Solution will provide all-important documentation, which will increasingly be required of growers,” the companies said.
Bill Whitacre, CEO-elect for Idaho-based Simplot, said in the release that the two companies’ partnership is the “starting point for creating track-and-traceable food/feed systems as well as demonstrating good agricultural practices.”
For farmers, demonstrating good stewardship and sustainable practices “begins at the field level with on-the-ground data management and documentation,” Whitacre said. “We’ve been developing this concept for several years and today it is a working reality.”
And the technology has “wide applications beyond Simplot,” he added. “We felt that by creating a separate and stand-alone company, we could maintain data privacy and make this platform available to the entire agricultural industry.”
