Executives emphasize that data sharing through this integration was always going to be completely voluntary for farmers.

February 15, 2020

2 Min Read
Climate terminates platform partner agreement with Tillable

Bayer’s digital agriculture division, The Climate Corp., announced Feb. 14 the termination of a partnership between its industry-leading FieldView digital farming platform and Tillable, a first-of-its-kind digital marketplace connecting farmers and landowners.

The agreement between the two companies, announced in October 2019, was set to commence this spring.

Mike Stern, CEO of The Climate Corp., said in a statement that the decision to back away from working with Tillable was based on feedback from customers.

“Our guiding principle is to support and simplify farmers’ operations by making it easy for farmers to share their own data with preferred, self-selected partners. As stated in our privacy policy, we have not, do not and will not share or sell our customers’ personal information or farm data with any third-party platform partners without customers’ consent.

“Customers have full control over who they share their data with, including third-party FieldView platform partners. No data sharing has been enabled with Tillable. We have no investment interests in Tillable or any of our platform partners,” said Stern.

Corbett Kull, CEO of Tillable, said in a statement that the goal of the partnership with Climate Fieldview was to let farmers elect to easily and efficiently share Climate FieldView data with their landlords for farms they rent through Tillable. Unfortunately, Kull said, there is a great deal of confusion about the relationship.

“I want to emphasize that any data sharing through this integration was always going to be completely voluntary for farmers. Tillable would never have had access to FieldView data unless farmers granted it. No implementation of the platform integration had occurred yet, no FieldView data was transferred and Tillable has not used or had access to FieldView data,” said Kull.

“Data is of critical importance for today’s farmers and landowners—and for us. We continue to believe in the importance of data in farm rental relationships, and the role of data transparency in strengthening those relationships and ensuring good stewardship of the land. We are working hard to earn the trust of landowners and farmers and we will continue to do so,” Kull said.

Approximately 40% of U.S. farmland is rented or leased, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. Despite the sizeable $32 billion farmland rental market in the U.S., Tillable is the first and only digital platform to optimize returns for landowners. The platform also is designed to help farmers access land to expand operations.

Launched in the U.S. in 2015, FieldView gives farmers a deeper understanding of their fields so they can make more informed operating decisions to optimize yields, maximize efficiency and reduce risk. FieldView is currently on more than 60 million paid acres across the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Europe and Argentina and on track to achieve more than 90 million paid acres globally in 2019.

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