Farmers Edge has rolled out a comprehensive R&D roadmap outlining its product enhancement and innovation plans through to 2019. On the heels of introducing 19 new tools this year, Farmers Edge aims to release over 90 additional ground-breaking digital agronomic tools to enable data-driven decision making and support high-yield crop production.
Since 2014, Farmers Edge has invested in digitizing their customers’ farms to automatically collect, integrate, and process data from multiple sources into one platform, including: on-farm weather stations, nearly every make and model of equipment, soil tests, daily satellite imagery, fertilizer application, and harvest data. Now processing over 50,000 fields a day and analyzing over 11 billion data records, Farmers Edge provides unbiased insights to help growers base farm management decisions on data, not marketing campaigns, traditional practices, or gut instincts.
Wade Barnes, president & CEO of Farmers Edge remarked, “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. It’s about accuracy, efficiency, productivity, and ease of use. This year, Farmers Edge is forecast to expand our data collection network to encompass over 8,500 weather stations and 25,000 telematics devices across 33 million paid product acres. That growth fuels the development of more tools to let growers experience the value of their farm data and show them how it can be used to save time, stay organized, and make more money. This isn’t just the beginning of decision agriculture, this is a digital disruption.”
Building upon their award-winning FarmCommand platform, a fully integrated system that consolidates all crop, weather, equipment, soil, and other agronomic data into one place, this roadmap serves as a blueprint for how the industry can begin to utilize digital tools and transition from precision agriculture to decision agriculture. This platform will serve as the foundation for a wide variety of new grower and partner facing decision-support solutions and services from Farmers Edge being released this year.
FarmCommand Mobile App: Creating convenience for growers to access important information in the field or in the cab, Farmers Edge has released FarmCommand as an integrated farm management application. Featuring field-centric weather, unique map layers, record-keeping, scouting tools, and instant job data, the app provides growers with more flexibility to benefit from their farm data management tools.
Crop Health Change Alerts: The first of their kind, Farmers Edge is developing crop health change notifications to help growers react to crop stress as it emerges. Processing imagery within 48 hours into three unique maps, Farmers Edge will automatically notify growers if a change in crop health has occurred making it easier for growers to understand what is happening to their crops, without stepping foot in the field.
Gen. 2 CanPlug: Adding new hardware to their line-up of data collection products, Farmers Edge is introducing their Gen. 2 CanPlug – an enhanced in-field telematics and data transfer device – to enable live harvest and profit data tracking. The Gen. 2 CanPlug provides faster data transfer and automatic mapping of cellular network connectivity.
Rapid Data Processing Engine: Focusing on providing insights faster, Farmers Edge introduced a Rapid Data Processing Engine capable of daily and on-demand processing of field-centric imagery, equipment, application, and harvest data.
Harvest Manager: Launching this fall, Farmers Edge will provide live grain tracking, including storage management, contract creation, field-pass cost accumulation, and live revenue calculation.
Profits-on-the-Go: The FarmCommand app will soon factor in variable costs to measure real-time profit analysis during harvest. Incorporating commodity prices, input and product costs, labour, and other operational fees with live yield-data, growers will be able to visualize their results and measure their profits right from the seat of their cab.
Treatment Analysis: Farmers Edge is releasing ROI analysis for treatment areas, creating the ability for growers to compare treatments across a single field and measure the outcome of each application decision.
Insurance Products: Announcing a first-of-its-kind partnership and landmark deal earlier this year, Farmers Edge has joined forces with PartnerRe to develop insurance products in main crop growing areas worldwide. Aimed at addressing the specific needs and challenges of farmers, these data-driven insurance products improve the efficiency and sustainability of their operations, and will enable growers to obtain insurance, customized to their individual needs and parameters.
eScout: Farmers Edge has integrated daily satellite imagery to eScout – an advanced scouting app designed to help agricultural professional enhance their agronomic services for their customers. Featuring GPS, a comprehensive database of pests, an agronomic calculator, and now daily imagery, eScout provides tools to monitor and address field conditions, create real-time reports, and manage scouting activities from one platform.
Inventory Management: Providing another level of data in FarmCommand, Farmers Edge is adding inventory management to help growers plan for the season, prepare for each field operation, and better control stock requirements.
Advanced Equipment Reporting: Analyzing the performance of every make and model of equipment in a consistent format, Farmers Edge provides comparative equipment information on both individual and aggregated levels to support operational and future purchase decisions.
Advanced Variety Benchmarking: Farmers Edge is now augmenting full-farm reporting on inputs with finely-tuned transparent insights on what varieties and hybrids are performing the best and what fertilizer practices are driving yield. Integrating data from tens of thousands of fields, growers can measure the relative yield of hybrids based on regional (60-480 miles) or site-specific performance to support seed selection. Variety benchmarking reports also enable more rapid and lower-risk testing of new technologies and offer opportunities for on-farm benchmarking against past performance, or from one field to another.
Growth Stage Modeling: New for 2018, Farmers Edge is providing growers with growth stage modeling across a variety of crops, including: corn, wheat, canola, barley, oats, peas, soybeans, cotton, winter wheat, lentils, sugar cane, sugar beets, potatoes, chickpeas, and flax. Visually identifying the current and predicted stage of the crop, the models are purposed to help growers apply products at the right time to maximize effectiveness and minimize the risk of crop damage.
Pest Prediction: Pest models are being released to notify growers of specific disease and insect risks in their fields, including fusarium head blight, wheat midge, sclerotinia, soybean aphid, corn grey leaf spot, and northern leaf blight. Powered by regional weather patterns and crop stage information, instant notifications help growers take proactive measures to protect yield and prevent further outbreak of pests.
Enhanced Yield Prediction Tool: Analyzing field-centric data at a finer spatial scale than ever before in agriculture, Farmers Edge has developed a model that accurately predicts zone-based yields to help growers plan for harvest and take a more informed position in the market place. As an essential component of their nitrogen modeling tool, enhanced yield prediction also helps growers successfully optimize fertilizer applications at the right rate, time, and place to reach their targeted yield goals.
