The Climate Corp., a subsidiary of Monsanto Co., announced Nov. 15 a partnership with Deveron UAS Corp. that will deliver farmers advanced aerial imagery data combined with powerful analytics through Climate Corp.’s industry-leading Climate FieldView digital agriculture platform. The addition of Deveron supports Climate’s commitment to deliver a true digital agriculture ecosystem where farmers can access a broad, interconnected set of tools, services and data to optimize all of their farm management decisions.

“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,” Climate Corp. chief technology officer Mark Young said. “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.” 

Based in Canada, Deveron is a leading full-service enterprise drone data company with a growing fleet of drones, each of which can conduct five to eight flights per day to collect, analyze and deliver data-driven insights to help farmers make more informed decisions, reduce costs and increase yields. Deveron services are currently offered to farmers across core growing regions of Canada, and the company will be expanding its capabilities to the U.S. Corn Belt in the near term.

During the 2017 growing season, Deveron and Climate Corp. completed a successful pilot program in Ontario that allowed farmers to visualize Deveron imagery within their Climate FieldView account. For the 2018 growing season, this partnership will enable aerial imagery data to seamlessly flow into a farmer’s Climate FieldView account at the farmer’s request to provide a deeper analysis of how crops are performing in season, alongside important field data layers such as planting and yield data. Recently, Climate Corp. announced the expansion of the Climate FieldView platform into western Canada, with the platform already in use on nearly 1 million acres in eastern Canada.

“The Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform aligns closely with our mission of delivering farmers a simple data collection solution, coupled with advanced analytics, to help farmers more precisely monitor their crops,” said David MacMillan, Deveron president and chief executive officer. “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.”

The Climate FieldView platform already offers advanced satellite imagery tools to help farmers protect their crops by identifying issues in the field before they affect yields. Innovative aerial imagery technologies like Deveron's can provide farmers with higher-resolution and higher-frequency imagery than satellite imagery, delivering on-demand information that can be used in digital agriculture tools to allow for more informed, data-driven agronomic decisions.

In 2016, Climate Corp. announced the extension of the Climate FieldView platform and has since announced a variety of partnerships, including several advanced aerial imagery providers. Climate Corp.’s platform strategy unlocks a stronger and quicker path to market for third-party agricultural innovators, simplifying the complex digital agriculture landscape for farmers and making it easier for other innovators to bring valuable new technologies to farmers faster.

Launched in 2015, the Climate FieldView platform is in use on more than 120 million acres with more than 100,000 users across the U.S., Brazil and Canada. It has quickly become the most broadly connected platform in the industry and continues to expand into new global regions. Earlier this week, the company also announced the pre-commercial launch of the Climate FieldView platform into regions of Europe.

As innovation in the digital agriculture space continues to accelerate rapidly around the globe, Climate Corp. continues to explore partnership opportunities to provide farmers with the insights they need to improve their productivity.