The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of Monsanto Company, has teamed up with innovative aerial imagery partners: Ceres Imaging, TerrAvion, and Agribotix, to deliver valuable, high-resolution imagery to farmers through The Climate Corporation’s industry-leading Climate FieldView digital agriculture platform.
“There have been tremendous advancements in innovative, aerial imagery technologies that are helping farmers and agriculture providers more precisely monitor crop health and performance at scale through increased image resolution and frequency,” said Mark Young, chief technology officer for The Climate Corporation. “As aerial imagery becomes of greater interest to farmers as a valuable tool to more efficiently manage their operations, we’re thrilled to collaborate with these companies to equip more farmers with the data-driven insights they need through one, connected digital ag platform.”
Climate already offers advanced satellite imagery tools to help farmers protect their crops by identifying issues in the field before they impact yield. Innovative aerial imagery technologies can provide farmers imagery at a higher resolution and frequency than satellite imagery, delivering on-demand information that can be used in digital ag tools to help farmers make more informed, data-driven agronomic decisions. With the addition of these new partnerships, aerial imagery data will seamlessly flow into a farmer’s Climate FieldView account from their imagery provider account, giving them the ability to access and visualize all of their data in one place alongside other important field data layers, including planting and yield data, to unlock new insights about field performance. Farmers can also experience deeper analysis of how their crops are performing in-season, identify potential yield-limiting factors, and take action early to protect yield, through a unified platform.
Ceres Imaging, TerrAvion, and Agribotix each provide unique offerings and capabilities:
Ceres Imaging: Based in Oakland, California, Ceres is an aerial spectral imagery and analytics company delivering university-validated agronomic insights to farmers. Using proprietary cameras, analytics, and ground-truthed crop models, Ceres delivers high-resolution spectral imagery as a service that helps farmers in the United States and Australia improve yields and reduce costs.
TerrAvion: Based in San Leandro, California, TerrAvion is one of the largest providers of operational imagery to agriculture in the United States and Chile. TerrAvion differentiates itself on operational reliability, speed of delivery, price, and working through retail agronomy organizations. TerrAvion serves a diverse farmer customer base in California and the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, and the Mississippi Delta and Florida.
Agribotix: Based in Boulder, Colorado, Agribotix delivers agricultural intelligence to increase yields and profits using drone-enabled technologies. All Agribotix solutions include FarmLens, a cloud-based data analysis and reporting solution for people using drones in agriculture. Results are available in a matter of hours. Agribotix serves a diverse customer base including farmers, coop’s, agronomy groups, equipment dealers, and other agricultural retailers across the United States, Canada, Latin America, and more than 50 different countries around the world.
To develop the Climate FieldView platform’s capability in this area, Climate is activating a commercial pilot with Ceres and TerrAvion in limited regions of the United States to provide high-resolution aerial imagery for the 2017 growing season. Customers interested in the Agribotix solution can visit their website to learn more. Current Climate customers will soon be able to request these new features right from within their Climate FieldView account. Additional regions and partners are expected to be added in the future.
