Farmers who visited the 2017 Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show (COFS) in Woodstock, Ontario had an opportunity to watch the Climate FieldView in action in a field scale demo.
So how’s it different from other precision agriculture application out there?
Owned by The Climate Corporation (a subsidiary of Monsanto), the key to the platform is a device called FieldView Drive that transfers field data from farmers’ onboard monitoring equipment to their Climate FieldView account. Ontario farmers started working with the program earlier this year.
Denise Hockaday, Climate Corporation’s commercial lead for Canada, says there are two main differences that separate Climate FieldView.
“It’s a platform, not a product. It brings the ability to pull multiple sources of information all into one spot that would otherwise not speak to each other,” says Hockaday. She notes that the COFS field demo included tractors, harvesters and sprayers from a range of manufacturers. Climate FieldView also brings together this information from field operations as well as other sources – satellite and aerial (drone) imagery and environmental information – to create analysis.
In this interview, Hockaday also notes that Climate FieldView is seamless and live. “When someone is passing over the field and capturing the information, they can then walk out of the cab of that tractor with their iPad and take their data with them – there’s no need for thumb drives and memory cards.”
Hockaday says Canadian users have given positive feedback on the platform’s ease of use and navigation. Climate Corporation will have a full picture of performance once farmers add 2017 harvest yield information to their data ‘layer cake.’
For 2018, new features will be added to the platform’s yield analysis, imagery, environmental information and activity tracking capabilities. A new Climate FieldView Drive with expanded capability will connect with even more equipment, seamlessly capturing information and bringing it into a farmer’s account. The company says the platform will also give users the ability to do manual scripting for both fertility and seeding. The yield analysis capabilities will also be enhanced, allowing farmers to create specific regions in a field for greater analysis.
Hockaday also notes that while the initial launch of the platform has focused on corn and soybean production in eastern Canada, they will continue to test Climate FieldView in western Canada to determine how it fits for farmers who grow canola, wheat, peas, lentils and other crops.
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