AUSTRALIAN agricultural chemical company, Nufarm, have announced an alliance with American digital technology company, Farmers Edge.
Nufarm, general manager Australia and New Zealand, Peter O’Keeffe said the deal would allow Nufarm to distribute the Farmers Edge suite of precision agriculture software and data solutions, including FarmCommand.
“The alliance combines the revolutionary use of data driven insights powered by on farm hardware, software, agronomy,” he said.
Any sharing of data would require grower permission
“FarmCommand eliminates the burden of combining and comparing information from multiple service providers by automatically integrating multiple sources of data into one place.
“The result is informed farmers making confident, data-driven decisions that lead to improved yield and increased profits”.
Mr O’Keeffe said Nufarm would not be distributing direct to farmers, instead they will work through their channel partners, or agribusiness re-sellers as they are known.
“We will be making this available to all our current distributors,” he said.
Digital agriculture and precision software is new territory for the company better known for glyphosate and other crop protection inputs.
Mr O’Keeffe said a motivator to branch into the sector was to get ahead of the game.
“We are confident this will be a huge part of agriculture in the future,” he said.
“We need to understand this space, so we formed an alliance with one of the leaders in the world.
We will be making this available to all our current distributors
“What a great way to learn.”
Mr O’Keeffe said by way of market competition, farmers are set to gain from the deal.
“They’ll end up with the best tools at their fingertips because of the extreme amount of interest in digital agtech space,” he said.
“There will be a lot of competition and a lot of collaboration, because different tools offer different solutions to the grower.
“The cream will rise to the top as far as what solutions are ultimately available.
“You will also see some excellent collaborations between the players as well, because it makes these tools more attractive to growers.”
Mr O’Keeffe said privacy, data security and ownership were quite rightly hot topics in the agricultural digital sector.
“We are treading very carefully,” he said.
“At this point in time we are interested in the data but we fully understand we have to be compliant as well as careful how we approach it.
“Any sharing of data would require grower permission, even at an aggregated level.
“We are still clarifying what that looks like.”
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