Understory, the weather network, edge computing, and machine learning company has announced an international expansion and strategic collaboration with Monsanto. Monsanto’s use of Understory’s weather network is providing on-the-ground insights into localized weather in Argentina to drive growers’ decisions and optimize high value operations.
“Understory provides the only technology necessary to make hyper-local weather valuable for operations management in agricultural areas where local weather information is not accurate.” said Giovanni Piccinni, Global Supply Chain Field Optimization Lead, Monsanto. “With localized accurate data, growers can streamline operational challenges and boost economic outcomes. We anticipate this being an important and valuable partnership.”
Monsanto and Understory tested a pilot program of their partnership in Hawaii over the past year, refining weather data use in day-to-day grower operations. This Understory international expansion with Monsanto means unprecedented localized weather networks in corn growing regions in Córdoba and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since Understory’s networks do not require maintenance, they can be deployed in remote areas and remain untouched for over five years. Each station in the network provides 50,000 measurements a second to power a fully built artificial intelligence core that provides precise hail, rainfall, temperature, humidity, evapotranspiration (moisture leaving the plant) and growing degree units (where a plant is in its lifecycle to determine best harvesting time). Understory data informs Monsanto’s decisions around irrigation, harvest dates and times, and seed production.
Understory’s weather network is different from other weather hardware. This network provides customers with a full-stack, rugged, maintenance-free, precision weather solution, where Understory sites, installs, and operates the network, while providing a real-time data platform and API. In addition, Understory’s weather network can be integrated with any third-party sensors currently available on the market.
“Argentina is an agricultural giant that produces 22 percent of the world’s soybeans, yet many growers there, and around the world, still lack data insights due to the remote, harsh farming conditions,” said Alex Kubicek, CEO, Understory. “Our collaboration with Monsanto promises to deliver daily operational insights to farmers around the world to yield better, healthier crops, and it can be deployed anywhere without the need for oversite or management.”
In the United States, Understory has saturated networks deployed across five major metropolitan areas with plans to expand to 5,000 stations covering all at risk areas by the end of 2019. In addition to agriculture, Understory provides damage analytics to P&C insurance industry to improve the claims experience for home and commercial properties. The patented technology provides actionable information that radar, satellite and other remote sensing technologies fail to deliver. Understory plans to make its technology available to additional agricultural partners in the near future.
