Improved access to technology and sensors for tracking the weather, machinery, and crop development are helping farmers and agronomists with crop management decisions.
“The ability to gather and integrate detailed information from growers’ fields, coupled with advances in weather forecasting, rapid processing, predictive modeling, and machine learning, is changing farming from a business that often reacts to the past to one that uses data to support decisions for seasons ahead,” notes Wade Barnes, CEO of Farmers Edge.
The Winnipeg-based precision agriculture company announced its R&D roadmap this week, outlining product enhancement and innovation plans through to 2019. The company says its pipeline includes at least 90 new tools for data-driven decision-making.
Farmers Edge has unveiled 19 new products, coinciding with the start of the 2018 growing season, including imagery-based crop health change alerts, which will notify growers automatically of changes in a field, pest prediction alerts, crop staging models, and an enhanced yield prediction model.
The company is also introducing its Gen. 2 Can plug for tracking machinery, enabling live harvest and profit data tracking, and automatic mapping of cell network connectivity.
Farmers Edge says it’s planning to add real-time profit analysis and ROI analysis on crop treatments to its field data platform.
After announcing its partnership with PartnerRe in February, the company is also getting set to roll out its first data-driven crop insurance products.
Barnes says they expect to expand the company’s network to include over 8,500 weather stations and 25,000 telematics devices across 33 million paid product acres in 2018.
