Combyne, the made-in-Canada grain marketing platform Bayer bought earlier this year, is now fully on speaking terms with the company’s Climate FieldView precision ag platform.
Bayer on Oct. 30 announced integration of the two platforms, which it said will allow grain farmers in Canada and the U.S. to connect their marketing data in Combyne and the agronomic data FieldView gathers from their field equipment.
Seeded-acreage and yield data from FieldView can thus allow Combyne users to accurately track the total bushels available to market without needing to export, upload and enter data twice, Bayer said.
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Once a farmer reviews the available FieldView data, using Combyne’s Import Review function, the harvested and projected-yield figures in Combyne will automatically update with the actual figures.
That in turn will make Combyne’s data on percentage sold and net marketed position more accurate, “using your real numbers off the combine instead of rough estimates,” according to Combyne’s website.
Incoming FieldView data will also allow a Combyne user to “know how much of your harvest is already committed and better manage your forward contracting.”
That means a “fuller and more accurate picture of current-year harvest totals and projections for future years to easily update crop contract and storage positions, and enable up-to-date crop marketing decisions,” Bayer said.
Combyne was released to the public in late 2021 by Ottawa Valley farmer Alain Goubau’s company Combyne Ag — previously known as the developer of the grain marketing tool FarmLead, which was sunset in 2020.
Combyne is meant to serve as a record-keeping and decision-making support tool, gathering information on grain storage balances, contracts, deliveries and settlements across multiple buyers — as well as net overall marketed positions per crop.
According to Bayer, which acquired Combyne Ag in January, the Combyne platform allows farmers to manage grain trade documents in one place for a clear view of contractual commitments, delivery status, storage positions and cash flow projections from grain sales, and thus better manage contract risk and delivery logistics.
“With accurate bushel quantities populating your marketed positions, you can better manage things like how forward contracted you are, how much of your harvest is already committed, and where things stand when it comes to your storage and deliveries,” Goubau, now CEO of Bayer’s Combyne Ag arm, said in Bayer’s Oct. 30 release.
“By working with FieldView, delivered grain outcomes in Combyne can eventually be connected back to the fields they originated from and the management choices made on those fields, for better mapping of quality specs such as grade and dockage from delivered loads,” he said.
That, in turn, allows for “field-level profitability insights — mapping actual revenue from sold crops against cost of production per field.”
Climate FieldView, which came to Bayer when it bought Monsanto in 2018, was launched in the U.S. in 2015 and in Canada late the following year.
It was developed by Climate Corp., a Monsanto arm since 2013, as a single platform to unite data from each piece of precision ag equipment, for access via smartphone, tablet or desktop. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
