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.

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

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“I’m not a big technology guy,” said Ferguson, who with his wife Regan farms 3,000 acres at Melfort, Sask.

But for him, using the various data-based management tools available in farming today isn’t just helpful, but essential. The problem is that bringing it all together in one place is critical so that he can handle it and not become overwhelmed, which is why he like Bayer’s FieldView.

AG IN MOTION VIDEO: Farmers review their data-driven decisions

The system brings together data streams from various sources, allowing a farmer to take a more holistic approach to management than hopping from app to app to app.

“Take time to learn it,” said Regan Ferguson, who likes the logistic and cost insights the program allows her to develop.

On Tuesday at Ag in Motion, Bayer put together a farmers’ panel to talk about how each uses the program. While it allows for much sophisticated analysis, if that’s what a farmer wants, it also allows for simpler but essential tasks, said Chris Bauer of Lake Lenore, Sask.

“We mark rocks with FieldView,” said Bauer about one of those basic uses, in which rocks are spotted during field operations, pinned and then picked up later.

Integrating data flow is important when most farms run various types of equipment.

“With the rainbow of colours of equipment on the farm, having a single data point … was number one for us,” said Bauer.

Eston, Sask. farmer Dave Hewlitt said that as well as the management and production gains that are possible with better data management, being able to show others a farm’s true results is likely to become more and more important.

“Verification might start to really matter,” he said.

While systems like FieldView are relatively new developments, in another way they have been around as long as farmers have been able to read and write.

“We used to say you have to put it down with pen and paper,” said Mike Ferguson.

“Now it’s on a tablet.”

— Ed White reports for the Western Producer from Winnipeg.

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“You have got to have the root purpose of why you got that technology. Either that or you talk to others to help you find that purpose,” said Regan Ferguson, who farms with her husband, Mike, near Melfort.

“I find that once you have a purpose, you’re more apt to dig into it further and become more comfortable with it because you’re finally finding the value in it.”

The Fergusons are first-year users of Bayer’s Climate FieldView, a multi-application digital agriculture platform. They discussed Fieldview and digital ag in general at a roundtable held Tuesday at Ag in Motion near Langham, Sask.

Research can take the mystery out of unfamiliar technology, said Ferguson.

“The more I looked into Climate, did research and learned about it, I found the ‘why’ and the purpose of its need on our farm and got more excited to get it in place this year.”

Climate FieldView has given her the ability to keep track of all equipment in the field, what it’s doing and whether it’s doing it right. It also provides a detailed record of the operation.

“It was reassuring to know that we had some kind of data to back us up if we ever needed it,” said Ferguson.

Bayer says Climate FieldView was designed to centralize data, visuals and reporting in a package that producers can interpret and act upon, by optimizing fertility, seeding management or other crop operations.

“We’ve got to do this because of our return on investment with chemical and fertility. We just want to put the fertilizer where it needs to be,” said Ferguson.

— Jeff Melchior reports for Alberta Farmer Express from Edmonton.

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Telus Agriculture and Rabo AgriFinance, which is headquartered in St. Louis and serves U.S. farm customers, announced Monday they’ve jointly bought software firm Conservis for an undisclosed sum.

Conservis comes to the joint venture already handling farmers’ financial reporting data via the Rabo AgriFinance platform since 2018, along with data from Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform, the John Deere Operations Center and Crop Data Management Systems’ crop chemical database.

The Minneapolis company’s products are meant to allow a farmer to integrate as-applied and yield data directly from those platforms into a “unified view” of the business, with “no extra hardware or manual data re-entry required.”

Thus, “with all your activity records in one spot, you can decide to share reports with landowners, regulators and lenders using data directly from your fields at any point in the season,” Conservis says on its website.

“Understanding your true cost, including cost per bushel and per acre will help ensure you make informed decisions that yield higher profits.”

Calgary-based Telus Agriculture has been shopping for farm management platforms since before Telus created the new ag unit last year, among them Decisive Farming, Farm At Hand, Muddy Boots and Feedlot Health Management Services.

The joint owners said their vision for Conservis is to deliver an “even more robust” platform across a “diverse range of crops and livestock.”

For its part, Telus Ag’s existing tech portfolio is expected to “help enhance the Conservis platform’s functionality” and include access to Telus’ Agricultural Data Exchange (ADX) and Agricultural Services platform (ASX).

The new owners said they “remain committed to Conservis’ strict data privacy standards,” emphasizing farmers on Conservis will still own their data and will still control when partners — Rabobank and Telus Ag included — get that information. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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John Deere on Nov. 12 announced it has acquired Fargo-based Harvest Profit for an undisclosed sum.

Harvest Profit — whose software was already integrated with the John Deere Operations Center system, as well as Climate FieldView and Agrimatics Libra Cart — will “retain its brand name” under Deere ownership, the company said in a release.

Harvest Profit’s current software offering will continue to be available through the John Deere Operations Center, Deere said. The acquisition “ensures current and prospective John Deere customers will have access to this analytical capability and provides them with continuity moving forward.”

That said, “Harvest Profit has and will continue to have API (application programming interface) connections with other farm management information systems,” Lane Arthur, Deere’s vice-president for data-applications and analytics, added via email.

Harvest Profit customers, he said, “have the choice to use the solution that best meets their needs.”

Just in August, Harvest Profit had announced “enhanced integration” with Bayer-owned Climate FieldView, which previously allowed the two systems to share information on fields and boundaries, but now also allows transfers of “as-applied data,” such as at plantings, sprayings and harvests.

First set up in 2015, Harvest Profit has said its products are meant to give farmers “more visibility into the financial side of your farm… making it easier for you to track your farm’s costs, profits, grain marketing positions and inventory.

“Spreadsheets are amazing tools that we are huge fans of, but they aren’t well-suited to the complex task of managing all of the inputs and outputs of a modern farm.”

Harvest Profit’s software “provides financial visibility for the customer of their operations enabling confident and proactive management decisions that make them more profitable and sustainable,” Arthur said in Deere’s release.

The Fargo company’s products, he said, “will provide John Deere customers with a forward-looking financial lens, better visibility into their farms’ profitability, and insights to help them make the best possible decisions managing their operations.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The company seeks to enroll about 1,200 row crop growers in its Bayer Carbon Initiative in the first season, scale up in upcoming seasons, and ultimately expand to other countries, company executives said.

In Brazil, Bayer expects to invest five million euros (C$7.76 million) via the program over three years, the company said in a separate statement in Portuguese. Executives declined to disclose the overall program cost in both countries.

A Bayer representative said via email the pilot “will help inform us on how we can take this program forward in other parts of the world — including Canada.”

The program is the latest in a string of recent environmentally focused initiatives by agriculture companies, which have been criticized for using harmful chemicals and not doing enough to stop deforestation in Brazil.

Global commodities trader Cargill kicked off a project this spring targeting greenhouse gas emissions and fertilizer runoff in Iowa, while agricultural co-operative Land O’Lakes last week announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to tackle sustainability and technology goals in the food system.

The announcements came after the U.S. Treasury Department in May clarified a federal tax credit designed to spur investment in carbon capture and sequestration projects.

Bayer’s program requires that farmers enroll in its Climate FieldView digital farming platform, where growers would log data about their eco-friendly farming practices such as no-till farming or planting cover crops. Those claims could then be verified by satellite imagery.

Bayer would compensate growers for sequestering carbon and pay them in cash or credits to buy products on its Bayer Plus rewards platform.

“If farmers are sequestering carbon to the benefit of society and the planet, they should to be rewarded for it,” Brett Begemann, chief operating officer of Bayer’s Crop Science division, told Reuters.

In Brazil, the company selected roughly 500 farmers in 14 states to participate, starting in the 2020-21 crop season with about 60,000 hectares of mainly soy and corn farms.

Begemann said the value of the carbon sequestered would be dictated by the market.

“At the end of the day, we have to have a clear line of sight that this has to contribute to Bayer’s bottom line and benefit our share owners as well.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Karl Plume in Chicago; additional reporting by Gabriel Araujo in Sao Paulo. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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Climate on Nov. 15 announced an “official” partnership with Toronto-based Deveron UAS, which operates a fleet of drones serving farm clients across North America, to deliver “advanced” aerial imagery data to its customers.

The two companies, during the 2017 growing season, ran a pilot program in Ontario, allowing Climate’s client farmers there to use Deveron drones’ imagery within their Climate FieldView accounts.

For the 2018 season, the companies said, Deveron will provide Climate with aerial imagery data it can then flow “seamlessly” into a Climate FieldView account at the farmer’s request, allowing for “deeper” analysis of how the farmer’s crops are performing in-season, alongside other data layers such as planting and yield data.

Where Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform uses satellite imagery tools to identify issues in a client’s field, Deveron’s drones can provide higher resolution and frequency than satellites, the companies said.

Data from Deveron drones’ lower-level flights “can be used in digital ag tools to help farmers make more informed, data-driven agronomic decisions,” they said.

Climate in January announced beta testing of its Climate FieldView platform in Western Canada during 2017, with a launch to follow later in the year. In Eastern Canada, the FieldView platform is already in use on almost a million acres, the company said.

Deveron today offers its services in “core” growing regions of Canada, having expanded its reach from Ontario eastward into Quebec and New Brunswick and westward this year into the three Prairie provinces.

The company also plans to spread its catchment into the U.S. Corn Belt in the “near term,” operating already in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota.

The Toronto firm announced in May it had become one of the first companies in Canada to receive “compliant operator” status under its federal special flight operations certificate (SFOC), using the SenseFly eBee UAV (unmanned airborne vehicle) system.

Since then, the company has set up partnership agreements to provide drone data to Growmark’s agronomy services arm FS Partners and to vegetable processor Bonduelle, among others.

“Partnering with the Climate FieldView platform will further our ability to bring low cost, high-resolution imagery to more farmers so they can zero in on exactly what’s happening in their fields and gain actionable insights to help them achieve the highest return on investment,” Deveron CEO David MacMillan said in the companies’ release.

“As remote sensing through advanced imagery continues its fast-paced development, drones are increasingly playing an important role to help farmers gain deeper insights into crop performance at scale,” Mark Young, chief technology officer for Climate Corp., said in the same release.

“Deveron has built a broad network of drones and sensors across North America to provide farmers with more data solutions to manage field variability, and we look forward to working with them to equip more farmers with data-rich imagery insights to make the best decisions for their operations.” — AGCanada.com Network

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The Climate Corp. announced Wednesday the Climate FieldView platform is available for purchase in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta on a per-acre basis, allowing farmers to start using it on their farms in time for the 2018 growing season.

To get the platform’s “complete value” for the whole growing season, the company advised interested farmers to sign up for a Climate FieldView account by Jan. 1.

Climate FieldView was made available to producers in Eastern Canada in September last year and has had a “strong testing effort across many farm operations in Western Canada,” the company said, with participation from “hundreds of farmers across nearly one million acres.”

The beta testing allowed the Climate Corp. to further develop the platform’s compatibility with all types of farm equipment and crops, including canola and wheat, to collect and analyze data from multiple sources, the company said.

Part of the challenge with field data is “managing all of the numbers and having an adequate cloud system to store and effectively analyze the information,” beta user D’Arcy Hilgartner, who farms near Camrose, Alta., said in the company’s release.

“The Climate FieldView platform instantly transfers the field data gathered from my farm equipment into my Climate FieldView account, which is especially useful during harvest season because I’m able to see where various crop inputs were used and analyze the corresponding yield.”

Climate FieldView was first launched in the U.S. in 2015 and was also made available to producers in Brazil earlier this year.

On the Prairies, users will be able to collect, store and visualize field data using the Climate FieldView Drive, which streams field data directly into the Climate FieldView platform.

The platform’s seed performance and analysis tools are meant to show users “what worked and what didn’t at the field level or by field zone, and apply those insights to better understand field variability by quickly and easily comparing digital field maps side-by-side.”

The platform uses satellite imagery to allow users to “instantly visualize and analyze” crop performance, identify issues, prioritize scouting and take action to protect yield, the company said.

The system is also meant to help users manage inputs to optimize yield using manual variable-rate seed and fertility scripting tools.

Farm equipment maker Agco last week announced a “digital partnership” agreement, giving Agco equipment users the option to connect with Climate FieldView using either FieldView Drive, Agco’s Precision Planting 20/20 SeedSense Display, or through application program interfaces (APIs), starting later this year.

The Climate Corp. last year also reached an agreement with John Deere allowing users to transfer current and historical field data between the John Deere Operations Center and Climate FieldView.

Agreements have also previously been reached for connectivity between Climate FieldView and agronomic software and equipment platforms including AgIntegrated OnSite, Agrian, SSI AgVance Mapping, FS Advanced Information Services, MapShots AgStudio and SST Summit. — AGCanada.com Network

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The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in August last year to block the proposed US$190 million deal, alleging the deal would lead to higher prices for high-speed precision planting equipment.

San Francisco-based Climate Corp. on Monday announced Monsanto’s “termination” of the deal, a sale which was first proposed in November 2015.

Closing the deal, the company said Monday, “has been delayed by Department of Justice concerns with the transaction.”

Two related agreements are also halted as a result of the cancelled deal, Deere said, including the ag equipment giant’s “Digital Ag Connectivity” agreement with Climate Corp.

Monsanto said Monday the end of that digital collaboration agreement will have “no impact” on current users of Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView system who use Deere’s Wireless Data Server (WDS) to stream data into their account.

Climate Corp. had started selling the Climate FieldView system to producers in Eastern Canada last fall for use in the 2017 crop season. Beta testing recently began for a rollout in Western Canada toward year’s end.

A separate agreement last fall with precision ag equipment firm Ag Leader — which would have allowed the Iowa company to make and sell Precision’s SpeedTube line and related tech such as Precision’s vSet, vDrive and DeltaForce systems — is also cancelled, Deere said Monday.

The Ag Leader deal had been conditional on the closing of Precision Planting’s sale to Deere.

“We are deeply disappointed in this outcome as we remain confident the acquisition would have benefited customers,” John May, Deere’s president for agricultural solutions, said Monday in a separate release.

Deere and Monsanto had planned to present their case for approval of the acquisition later this year, the ag equipment firm said.

“With an opportunity to see this to conclusion, we believe it would have been clear the challenge to the transaction was based on flawed assessments of the marketplace,” May said.

A Deere spokesperson last fall told the Reuters news service the DOJ’s antitrust suit followed a protest by an unnamed Deere competitor.

Deere’s position, the spokesperson said, is that the suit was “designed to protect a competitor, not competition.”

U.S. acting assistant Attorney General Andrew Finch, in a release Monday from the justice department’s antitrust division, described the companies’ decision to scrap the deal as “a victory for American farmers and consumers.”

If the deal had gone ahead, he said, “significant head-to-head competition” between Deere and Precision Planting “would have been lost,” as a sale would have combined “the only two significant U.S. providers” of high-speed precision planting systems.

Climate Corp. said Monday it made the strategic decision in 2015 to focus its business “exclusively” on its digital ag platform and that strategy “has not changed.”

Climate still aims to sell the Precision Planting equipment business and has “spoken with several third parties that have expressed interest in purchasing it,” the company added Monday.

For its part, Deere said Monday it “will remain focused on enabling customers to efficiently leverage their data to drive better decisions on their farms through the John Deere Operations Center.” — AGCanada.com Network

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Management from Monsanto and its farm data systems arm, The Climate Corp., speaking on a conference call Thursday, said they see a launch for their Climate FieldView platform in Western Canada toward the end of 2017, as they work on the platform’s compatibility with small grains and related equipment.

The Climate FieldView suite, launched in 2015 in the U.S. to tie Climate Corp.’s product offerings into one package, comes also to Brazil this year. Launches in Australia, Argentina and South Africa are expected in 2018-19, the companies said.

The company said it will also bring its products into the European market in 2018-19, having taken its first steps there by buying Estonian farm management software firm VitalFields in November.

The FieldView package had its Canadian launch in September at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show and was offered for sale in the East last month, for use in the 2017 crop season

Climate CEO Mike Stern on Thursday described the East as “very much of a corn and soybean environment,” similar to the company’s markets in Michigan and Ohio.

The FieldView suite of tools is meant to allow farmers to visualize and analyze crop performance, using field data maps as well as satellite imagery.

Thursday’s conference call laid out near-term plans for both Climate Corp.’s and Monsanto’s research and development pipelines, and noted Climate has “more than 35” R+D projects in the works.

“Farming at the zone level is the new reality,” Climate’s chief scientist Sam Eathington said in the company’s release.

Climate, he said, “is already delivering advanced seed scripting and zone-level nitrogen monitoring capabilities, and our robust research pipeline ensures we will continue to provide farmers actionable insights to help them operate more efficiently and sustainably.”

Among those, the company said, it plans to develop variable-rate prescription tools for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, creating what it described as “the industry’s first comprehensive fertility solution, delivering customized insights for crop nutrition and fertility management.”

The company, through collection and analysis of “millions” of data points on seed product performance across various geographies, said it also plans to provide seed product selection plans for its farmer users.

Climate said its field health research will lead to development of a disease insights package, identifying and predicting a specific field’s disease vulnerability and diagnosing crop diseases, applying artificial intelligence to images of infected plants.

Climate said it’s also working on a new “directed scouting” tool to help farmers better sort out which fields to prioritize before heading out to scout.

That tool, which Climate said will be “a first for the digital ag industry,” is meant to help farmers save time and protect yield, before yield is impacted at the end of the season.

Collaborations

Monsanto also laid out a number of key projects in its own R+D pipeline, including its Higher-Yielding Corn trait family, a collaboration with BASF; the DeKalb Disease Shield corn hybrids platform; and Acceleron seed-applied disease protection products, a collaboration with Bayer.

The company said it’s also working on an “innovative biological approach” to control varroa mite infestations in bee colonies, and a seed-applied nematode control product, dubbed NemaStrike.

Noting the still-pending merger plans between Bayer CropScience and Monsanto, the company’s chief technology officer Robert Fraley said Thursday that “parallel development” of herbicides and crop traits would allow the combined company to shave “years” off the delivery timelines for products in its pipeline.

Accelerated earnings, he said, could then be allocated toward additional areas of R+D.

Monsanto on Wednesday also announced it has reached a global licensing agreement with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for agricultural applications of the institute’s new CRISPR-Cpf1 genome-editing technology.

The agreement’s specific terms weren’t disclosed Wednesday. Monsanto has previously signed deals for other genome-editing technologies for agricultural use, including a license from the Broad Institute for use of the CRISPR-Cas9 system.

CRISPR-Cpf1, Monsanto said, marks “an exciting advance in genome-editing technology, because it has potential to be a simpler and more precise tool for making targeted improvements in a cell’s DNA when compared to the CRISPR-Cas9 system.” — AGCanada.com Network

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