Bayer on Oct. 30 announced integration of the two platforms, which it said will allow grain farmers in Canada and the U.S. to connect their marketing data in Combyne and the agronomic data FieldView gathers from their field equipment.

Seeded-acreage and yield data from FieldView can thus allow Combyne users to accurately track the total bushels available to market without needing to export, upload and enter data twice, Bayer said.

Once a farmer reviews the available FieldView data, using Combyne’s Import Review function, the harvested and projected-yield figures in Combyne will automatically update with the actual figures.

That in turn will make Combyne’s data on percentage sold and net marketed position more accurate, “using your real numbers off the combine instead of rough estimates,” according to Combyne’s website.

Incoming FieldView data will also allow a Combyne user to “know how much of your harvest is already committed and better manage your forward contracting.”

That means a “fuller and more accurate picture of current-year harvest totals and projections for future years to easily update crop contract and storage positions, and enable up-to-date crop marketing decisions,” Bayer said.

Combyne was released to the public in late 2021 by Ottawa Valley farmer Alain Goubau’s company Combyne Ag — previously known as the developer of the grain marketing tool FarmLead, which was sunset in 2020.

Combyne is meant to serve as a record-keeping and decision-making support tool, gathering information on grain storage balances, contracts, deliveries and settlements across multiple buyers — as well as net overall marketed positions per crop.

According to Bayer, which acquired Combyne Ag in January, the Combyne platform allows farmers to manage grain trade documents in one place for a clear view of contractual commitments, delivery status, storage positions and cash flow projections from grain sales, and thus better manage contract risk and delivery logistics.

“With accurate bushel quantities populating your marketed positions, you can better manage things like how forward contracted you are, how much of your harvest is already committed, and where things stand when it comes to your storage and deliveries,” Goubau, now CEO of Bayer’s Combyne Ag arm, said in Bayer’s Oct. 30 release.

“By working with FieldView, delivered grain outcomes in Combyne can eventually be connected back to the fields they originated from and the management choices made on those fields, for better mapping of quality specs such as grade and dockage from delivered loads,” he said.

That, in turn, allows for “field-level profitability insights — mapping actual revenue from sold crops against cost of production per field.”

Climate FieldView, which came to Bayer when it bought Monsanto in 2018, was launched in the U.S. in 2015 and in Canada late the following year.

It was developed by Climate Corp., a Monsanto arm since 2013, as a single platform to unite data from each piece of precision ag equipment, for access via smartphone, tablet or desktop. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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“I’m not a big technology guy,” said Ferguson, who with his wife Regan farms 3,000 acres at Melfort, Sask.

But for him, using the various data-based management tools available in farming today isn’t just helpful, but essential. The problem is that bringing it all together in one place is critical so that he can handle it and not become overwhelmed, which is why he like Bayer’s FieldView.

AG IN MOTION VIDEO: Farmers review their data-driven decisions

The system brings together data streams from various sources, allowing a farmer to take a more holistic approach to management than hopping from app to app to app.

“Take time to learn it,” said Regan Ferguson, who likes the logistic and cost insights the program allows her to develop.

On Tuesday at Ag in Motion, Bayer put together a farmers’ panel to talk about how each uses the program. While it allows for much sophisticated analysis, if that’s what a farmer wants, it also allows for simpler but essential tasks, said Chris Bauer of Lake Lenore, Sask.

“We mark rocks with FieldView,” said Bauer about one of those basic uses, in which rocks are spotted during field operations, pinned and then picked up later.

Integrating data flow is important when most farms run various types of equipment.

“With the rainbow of colours of equipment on the farm, having a single data point … was number one for us,” said Bauer.

Eston, Sask. farmer Dave Hewlitt said that as well as the management and production gains that are possible with better data management, being able to show others a farm’s true results is likely to become more and more important.

“Verification might start to really matter,” he said.

While systems like FieldView are relatively new developments, in another way they have been around as long as farmers have been able to read and write.

“We used to say you have to put it down with pen and paper,” said Mike Ferguson.

“Now it’s on a tablet.”

— Ed White reports for the Western Producer from Winnipeg.

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“You have got to have the root purpose of why you got that technology. Either that or you talk to others to help you find that purpose,” said Regan Ferguson, who farms with her husband, Mike, near Melfort.

“I find that once you have a purpose, you’re more apt to dig into it further and become more comfortable with it because you’re finally finding the value in it.”

The Fergusons are first-year users of Bayer’s Climate FieldView, a multi-application digital agriculture platform. They discussed Fieldview and digital ag in general at a roundtable held Tuesday at Ag in Motion near Langham, Sask.

Research can take the mystery out of unfamiliar technology, said Ferguson.

“The more I looked into Climate, did research and learned about it, I found the ‘why’ and the purpose of its need on our farm and got more excited to get it in place this year.”

Climate FieldView has given her the ability to keep track of all equipment in the field, what it’s doing and whether it’s doing it right. It also provides a detailed record of the operation.

“It was reassuring to know that we had some kind of data to back us up if we ever needed it,” said Ferguson.

Bayer says Climate FieldView was designed to centralize data, visuals and reporting in a package that producers can interpret and act upon, by optimizing fertility, seeding management or other crop operations.

“We’ve got to do this because of our return on investment with chemical and fertility. We just want to put the fertilizer where it needs to be,” said Ferguson.

— Jeff Melchior reports for Alberta Farmer Express from Edmonton.

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Telus Agriculture and Rabo AgriFinance, which is headquartered in St. Louis and serves U.S. farm customers, announced Monday they’ve jointly bought software firm Conservis for an undisclosed sum.

Conservis comes to the joint venture already handling farmers’ financial reporting data via the Rabo AgriFinance platform since 2018, along with data from Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform, the John Deere Operations Center and Crop Data Management Systems’ crop chemical database.

The Minneapolis company’s products are meant to allow a farmer to integrate as-applied and yield data directly from those platforms into a “unified view” of the business, with “no extra hardware or manual data re-entry required.”

Thus, “with all your activity records in one spot, you can decide to share reports with landowners, regulators and lenders using data directly from your fields at any point in the season,” Conservis says on its website.

“Understanding your true cost, including cost per bushel and per acre will help ensure you make informed decisions that yield higher profits.”

Calgary-based Telus Agriculture has been shopping for farm management platforms since before Telus created the new ag unit last year, among them Decisive Farming, Farm At Hand, Muddy Boots and Feedlot Health Management Services.

The joint owners said their vision for Conservis is to deliver an “even more robust” platform across a “diverse range of crops and livestock.”

For its part, Telus Ag’s existing tech portfolio is expected to “help enhance the Conservis platform’s functionality” and include access to Telus’ Agricultural Data Exchange (ADX) and Agricultural Services platform (ASX).

The new owners said they “remain committed to Conservis’ strict data privacy standards,” emphasizing farmers on Conservis will still own their data and will still control when partners — Rabobank and Telus Ag included — get that information. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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John Deere on Nov. 12 announced it has acquired Fargo-based Harvest Profit for an undisclosed sum.

Harvest Profit — whose software was already integrated with the John Deere Operations Center system, as well as Climate FieldView and Agrimatics Libra Cart — will “retain its brand name” under Deere ownership, the company said in a release.

Harvest Profit’s current software offering will continue to be available through the John Deere Operations Center, Deere said. The acquisition “ensures current and prospective John Deere customers will have access to this analytical capability and provides them with continuity moving forward.”

That said, “Harvest Profit has and will continue to have API (application programming interface) connections with other farm management information systems,” Lane Arthur, Deere’s vice-president for data-applications and analytics, added via email.

Harvest Profit customers, he said, “have the choice to use the solution that best meets their needs.”

Just in August, Harvest Profit had announced “enhanced integration” with Bayer-owned Climate FieldView, which previously allowed the two systems to share information on fields and boundaries, but now also allows transfers of “as-applied data,” such as at plantings, sprayings and harvests.

First set up in 2015, Harvest Profit has said its products are meant to give farmers “more visibility into the financial side of your farm… making it easier for you to track your farm’s costs, profits, grain marketing positions and inventory.

“Spreadsheets are amazing tools that we are huge fans of, but they aren’t well-suited to the complex task of managing all of the inputs and outputs of a modern farm.”

Harvest Profit’s software “provides financial visibility for the customer of their operations enabling confident and proactive management decisions that make them more profitable and sustainable,” Arthur said in Deere’s release.

The Fargo company’s products, he said, “will provide John Deere customers with a forward-looking financial lens, better visibility into their farms’ profitability, and insights to help them make the best possible decisions managing their operations.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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This could be as simple as documenting yield data and for many farmers, that may still be all they are doing. But as we move into a more precision-based agriculture, the more data points we have, the better.

Lydia Parker comes from a long line of farmers in Ontario. She studied agriculture at the University of Guelph and in her role as a field product specialist for Climate FieldView, she helps farmers maximize their data collection.

“Good data collection is something we try to preach,” said Parker. “At the end of the day, if you don’t collect good data, you can’t get good answers.”

So, what is “good data?” If you’re just entertaining this question now, your options might be limited, but if the goal is to improve the profitability of your operation in the future, then planning for better data collection next year, can be a step in the right direction.

“Data collection, no matter what it looks like, is extremely important,” Parker said. “If all you’re collecting is your harvest data, that’s great. Quite frankly, it’s better than nothing. But if you can collect harvest data along with planting data, then all of a sudden it tells a way better story.”

Good data is all about context. With only harvest data, you might be able to determine which of your fields were most productive. But without context, that data isn’t particularly useful. However, even if you have been capturing only harvest data, but have been doing so for several years (i.e. more data points), trends start to emerge. By simply including the context of time, this data becomes much more useful.

Nevertheless, if this is all you’ve been doing, then you’re missing some opportunities to maximize potential. While harvest data is arguably the most important information collected, it is more impactful when combined with other data collected throughout the season. This could mean your planting data, your spray data, and your fertility data, whether you used tillage – these are all things that can affect how things turn out at the end of the year.

“If all we have for a specific field is a yield number, it’s hard to make decisions from that if, let’s say, there were two hybrids planted in that field,” said Parker. “If we don’t have those planting layers, it’s really hard to make the most sense out of what your yield data looks like.”

But data collection doesn’t have to stop with big-picture items. Anecdotal pieces of information (photographs, scouting notes, etc.) can also help provide context.

“Those little pieces of information are the meat of the story,” says Parker. It can be as simple as documenting differences in emergence in various parts of a field. “You may not know if you’re going to need them, or what role it could play down the road. But if there’s something of interest just capturing a couple of notes or capturing a photograph potentially serve a purpose for explaining why something happens down the road,” she said.

It’s likely becoming clear that managing of all that data is going to be a challenge. Parker’s company, Climate FieldView has placed itself to streamline the data collection and analysis process.

FieldView is a digital tool. It has a website interface that growers can interact with, along with two apps – one that manages data collection and storage and the other that provides analysis.

“We have a little device that’s called the FieldView Drive, that looks like a little hockey puck, and it screws into the CAN port of various pieces of equipment,” explains Parker.

Depending on the activity the drive can record things such as yield data, moisture levels, or how many seeds are going down in a specific part of the field.

“Basically, as it’s travelling through the field, it is recording all of the various data points and then making maps out of them,” says Parker.

Of course many growers may be using older equipment that isn’t outfitted with a CAN port so there are options for growers to input information manually.

The company also offers local weather data over the course of the growing season that tracks factors that might affect productivity, like downpours or early frosts. It also provides satellite imagery.

“We work with various satellite providers.

“They provide us with NDVI images that we process in house and then give back out to our customers.” The NDVI images track how biomass in the field is changing throughout the season.

“One of our pillars is about getting all of your data into one place,” Parker said. “A farmer might have their sales bill from when they purchase seed; they might work with a custom person to do their spraying; they might jot notes down in a notebook or they may text things to their agronomist.”

Basically, there are almost an unlimited number of places where data points get stored.

“It’s about putting all the puzzle pieces together,” said Parker.

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The company has launched a new tool within the web-based field management system; one that allows the producer to create customized variable-rate prescription maps for fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. Prescriptions can then be uploaded to the sprayer via USB.

“Regardless of product, the farmer can create special management zones within each field and assign product rates to each region, while following label directions,” the company said in a release earlier this summer.

Why it matters: Climate FieldView is among the digital agriculture products trying to eke out more efficiency from spray passes, and that includes identifying the parts of the field where it doesn’t pay to apply.

Marvin Talsma, field product specialist with Climate Corporation, said the tool expands FieldView’s prescription maps from seeding and fertilizer to now include crop protection products.

“In my experience as an agronomist prior to joining FieldView, that’s one of the challenges that we had when trying to manage crops in the field,” he said. “Not every area needed the same amount of fertilizer or needed to have a fungicide or a herbicide potentially applied to it, so how do we manage that? How can we use our resources more effectively and get that farmer more return at the end of the season?”

Data collected from FieldView, such as yield, seeding or input use over zones, can then be shared with a farmer’s agronomist or other consultants.

The tool’s premise is not unique in the world of digital field management. Xarvio Digital Farming Solutions, for example, makes an almost identical marketing pitch for its Field Manager, which also promises to stretch inputs and increase efficiency by identifying zones that don’t make economical sense to spray.

Also similar to those products, Climate Corporation promises that the producer will be able to track inputs according to zone through Climate FieldView, incorporate drone imagery and overlay multiple data layers.

The manual feature, however, puts more control in the hands of the farmer, Talsma argues. Users have the option of uploading files to create the prescription, or to actually draw their own zones using soil maps, yield maps or other data layers as reference.

Users can track, “all the activities that farmers have in their field,” Talsma said.

A producer using the service could expect to track seeding, fertilizer, historical trends and yields through different zones over years.

“This allows a farmer on his or her own, to create these zones on his or her own as opposed to possibly someone creating them for them,” Talsma said. “Farmers have the most knowledge and insight on the fields or the farms that they’re working with, so let’s give them the tool.”

The system is compatible with a “large” number of equipment brands, he also noted.

“I’m not going to say that we have them all, but we have the major monitors — Raven, Ag Leader, Case, John Deere,” he said.

The launch had not garnered a “huge amount of interest,” from farmers in the first few weeks of its release, according to Talsma, although he expects producers will be mulling over if or how such a tool could integrate with their farms.

“We may be talking about fungicides in canola to identify areas that are at higher risk versus lower risk based on biomass, but what about a corn crop that we’re targeting tassel timing and my field is uneven and I need to target that. Is there a way I can create those zones and identify those areas maybe based on a soil map or something?” he said.

“As farmers are introduced to these ideas and these new features and functions, they’re very creative and they’re very innovative in coming up with potential use cases,” he added.

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The company seeks to enroll about 1,200 row crop growers in its Bayer Carbon Initiative in the first season, scale up in upcoming seasons, and ultimately expand to other countries, company executives said.

In Brazil, Bayer expects to invest five million euros (C$7.76 million) via the program over three years, the company said in a separate statement in Portuguese. Executives declined to disclose the overall program cost in both countries.

A Bayer representative said via email the pilot “will help inform us on how we can take this program forward in other parts of the world — including Canada.”

The program is the latest in a string of recent environmentally focused initiatives by agriculture companies, which have been criticized for using harmful chemicals and not doing enough to stop deforestation in Brazil.

Global commodities trader Cargill kicked off a project this spring targeting greenhouse gas emissions and fertilizer runoff in Iowa, while agricultural co-operative Land O’Lakes last week announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to tackle sustainability and technology goals in the food system.

The announcements came after the U.S. Treasury Department in May clarified a federal tax credit designed to spur investment in carbon capture and sequestration projects.

Bayer’s program requires that farmers enroll in its Climate FieldView digital farming platform, where growers would log data about their eco-friendly farming practices such as no-till farming or planting cover crops. Those claims could then be verified by satellite imagery.

Bayer would compensate growers for sequestering carbon and pay them in cash or credits to buy products on its Bayer Plus rewards platform.

“If farmers are sequestering carbon to the benefit of society and the planet, they should to be rewarded for it,” Brett Begemann, chief operating officer of Bayer’s Crop Science division, told Reuters.

In Brazil, the company selected roughly 500 farmers in 14 states to participate, starting in the 2020-21 crop season with about 60,000 hectares of mainly soy and corn farms.

Begemann said the value of the carbon sequestered would be dictated by the market.

“At the end of the day, we have to have a clear line of sight that this has to contribute to Bayer’s bottom line and benefit our share owners as well.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Karl Plume in Chicago; additional reporting by Gabriel Araujo in Sao Paulo. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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Climate on Nov. 15 announced an “official” partnership with Toronto-based Deveron UAS, which operates a fleet of drones serving farm clients across North America, to deliver “advanced” aerial imagery data to its customers.

The two companies, during the 2017 growing season, ran a pilot program in Ontario, allowing Climate’s client farmers there to use Deveron drones’ imagery within their Climate FieldView accounts.

For the 2018 season, the companies said, Deveron will provide Climate with aerial imagery data it can then flow “seamlessly” into a Climate FieldView account at the farmer’s request, allowing for “deeper” analysis of how the farmer’s crops are performing in-season, alongside other data layers such as planting and yield data.

Where Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform uses satellite imagery tools to identify issues in a client’s field, Deveron’s drones can provide higher resolution and frequency than satellites, the companies said.

Data from Deveron drones’ lower-level flights “can be used in digital ag tools to help farmers make more informed, data-driven agronomic decisions,” they said.

Climate in January announced beta testing of its Climate FieldView platform in Western Canada during 2017, with a launch to follow later in the year. In Eastern Canada, the FieldView platform is already in use on almost a million acres, the company said.

Deveron today offers its services in “core” growing regions of Canada, having expanded its reach from Ontario eastward into Quebec and New Brunswick and westward this year into the three Prairie provinces.

The company also plans to spread its catchment into the U.S. Corn Belt in the “near term,” operating already in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota.

The Toronto firm announced in May it had become one of the first companies in Canada to receive “compliant operator” status under its federal special flight operations certificate (SFOC), using the SenseFly eBee UAV (unmanned airborne vehicle) system.

Since then, the company has set up partnership agreements to provide drone data to Growmark’s agronomy services arm FS Partners and to vegetable processor Bonduelle, among others.

“Partnering with the Climate FieldView platform will further our ability to bring low cost, high-resolution imagery to more farmers so they can zero in on exactly what’s happening in their fields and gain actionable insights to help them achieve the highest return on investment,” Deveron CEO David MacMillan said in the companies’ release.

“As remote sensing through advanced imagery continues its fast-paced development, drones are increasingly playing an important role to help farmers gain deeper insights into crop performance at scale,” Mark Young, chief technology officer for Climate Corp., said in the same release.

“Deveron has built a broad network of drones and sensors across North America to provide farmers with more data solutions to manage field variability, and we look forward to working with them to equip more farmers with data-rich imagery insights to make the best decisions for their operations.” — AGCanada.com Network

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The Climate Corp. announced Wednesday the Climate FieldView platform is available for purchase in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta on a per-acre basis, allowing farmers to start using it on their farms in time for the 2018 growing season.

To get the platform’s “complete value” for the whole growing season, the company advised interested farmers to sign up for a Climate FieldView account by Jan. 1.

Climate FieldView was made available to producers in Eastern Canada in September last year and has had a “strong testing effort across many farm operations in Western Canada,” the company said, with participation from “hundreds of farmers across nearly one million acres.”

The beta testing allowed the Climate Corp. to further develop the platform’s compatibility with all types of farm equipment and crops, including canola and wheat, to collect and analyze data from multiple sources, the company said.

Part of the challenge with field data is “managing all of the numbers and having an adequate cloud system to store and effectively analyze the information,” beta user D’Arcy Hilgartner, who farms near Camrose, Alta., said in the company’s release.

“The Climate FieldView platform instantly transfers the field data gathered from my farm equipment into my Climate FieldView account, which is especially useful during harvest season because I’m able to see where various crop inputs were used and analyze the corresponding yield.”

Climate FieldView was first launched in the U.S. in 2015 and was also made available to producers in Brazil earlier this year.

On the Prairies, users will be able to collect, store and visualize field data using the Climate FieldView Drive, which streams field data directly into the Climate FieldView platform.

The platform’s seed performance and analysis tools are meant to show users “what worked and what didn’t at the field level or by field zone, and apply those insights to better understand field variability by quickly and easily comparing digital field maps side-by-side.”

The platform uses satellite imagery to allow users to “instantly visualize and analyze” crop performance, identify issues, prioritize scouting and take action to protect yield, the company said.

The system is also meant to help users manage inputs to optimize yield using manual variable-rate seed and fertility scripting tools.

Farm equipment maker Agco last week announced a “digital partnership” agreement, giving Agco equipment users the option to connect with Climate FieldView using either FieldView Drive, Agco’s Precision Planting 20/20 SeedSense Display, or through application program interfaces (APIs), starting later this year.

The Climate Corp. last year also reached an agreement with John Deere allowing users to transfer current and historical field data between the John Deere Operations Center and Climate FieldView.

Agreements have also previously been reached for connectivity between Climate FieldView and agronomic software and equipment platforms including AgIntegrated OnSite, Agrian, SSI AgVance Mapping, FS Advanced Information Services, MapShots AgStudio and SST Summit. — AGCanada.com Network

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