I worked for The Climate Corporation when it was acquired by Monsanto (now Bayer) for $1B.
There is certainly plenty of potential for innovative tech in agriculture, but it’s a really tough space. Machine learning and big data are not magic bullets. The level of noise in experimental measurements is very high, which makes it difficult to prove the effectiveness of almost any intervention.
Climate Corp did (and still does) sell a SAS product advising growing decisions based on machine learning. But the price of that product has fallen dramatically over time, and now it’s nearly free. The premium product now has a list price of $1/acre vs. expected grower revenue of ~$700/acre (for corn in the US). What does that say about the value the software provides?
Well..hold my beer! Field view collected so much data that the farmer doesn’t need(aka can’t use). And paid for it.
There is so much data in the field that is worth more than the crop that is being sold. So..no..the farmer doesn’t get to monetize it. Farmers shouldn’t have to pay for any data collected that isn’t used by him but can be commoditized.
In fact farmers should be PAID for allowing companies to extract data. They are mining data from our fields and making US pay for it. It’s like how Tom Sawyer painted his fence!
There is undoubtedly some value in this data, but it is far less than you think. Despite the hype about big data, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions from any uncontrolled observational trial.
Consider how often nutrition studies contradict each other. We still don’t know for sure if it’s better to eat less red meat!
Having spent a bit of time working in this space, I can assure you that it is basically the same scenario. If Climate Corp could prove that the data they are collecting with FieldView was valuable, they would be making a heck of a lot more money.
There is certainly plenty of potential for innovative tech in agriculture, but it’s a really tough space. Machine learning and big data are not magic bullets. The level of noise in experimental measurements is very high, which makes it difficult to prove the effectiveness of almost any intervention.
Climate Corp did (and still does) sell a SAS product advising growing decisions based on machine learning. But the price of that product has fallen dramatically over time, and now it’s nearly free. The premium product now has a list price of $1/acre vs. expected grower revenue of ~$700/acre (for corn in the US). What does that say about the value the software provides?