AG-ANALYTICS AIMS TO PROVIDE ACCURATE REVENUE INFORMATION WITH DATA

THE COMPANY HAS A FEW FREE APPLICATIONS AND A PROGRAM CALLED PROFITLAYERS.

With the rampant rise of ag technology, Ag-Analytics hopes to emerge with multiple uses for the data it gathers and partnerships to enhance the ease of use and quality involved.

Based in Ithaca, New York, the company possesses multiple tools for farmers to use and more in the beta stage with the goal of getting added on later.

“In a nutshell, Ag-Analytics is a farm-management platform, so we offer a variety of data services,” says Joshua Woodard, CEO and founder of Ag-Analytics. “We also work with a lot of other companies to build custom solutions. Our sweet spot is in the market on the modeling side. We also do a lot of work with risk analysis.”

The company has only officially been around for a couple years, but it’s a product of Woodard’s research at Cornell University, where he researched as a professor.

Woodard says his background holds more of a risk-management approach instead of technology. Woodard believes the risk-management thinking gives Ag-Analytics a specialty that other technology companies don’t have as much focus on.

“We bring in lots of different satellite data; we’re connected to John Deere Operations Center and also some other precision ag systems like Climate,” Woodard says. “We bring that together also with public data – all the public weather data you may find, soil data, etc. We also sell soil tests; we have a program beta for that. So we bring that all on the platform and essentially we have models and artificial intelligence technology that we developed to do things like yield prediction and other things.”

One of the premium tools provided with the company is the ProfitLayers feature. ProfitLayers keeps track of harvest results and the different seeds, treatment, and tillage that gets used on specific fields.

The feature also allows farmers to input the cost of the resources used, and it calculates the revenue generated per acre. The revenue and cost feature digs deeper by evaluating the different results for smaller zones of land to identify which areas are more profitable or not.

Woodard emphasizes the data results show profit, not yield.

“We’ve seen a lot of fields that you might say, ‘Oh, I have really high yield on this part of the field.’ That’s great, but then you go and look at what the inputs were and they were losing money on that part of the field, even though in some cases the yield was higher,” Woodard says.

ProfitLayers also teams up with John Deere Operations Center to gain more analysis and record from year to year.

The feature gives users a 30-day free trial with a $20 monthly fee afterward, but the company also sports free features.

One of the main free tools Ag-Analytics owns is FarmScope. FarmScope incorporates multiple sources of public data to look at specific areas. Users can go a specific state, then county, then farm and look at what weather information and historical data that’s available.

“We have a mapping application,” Woodard says. “This mapping application is free, so all the things like satellite data, real-time weather alerts, we can find all that for free. You can create an account or not create an account.”

Woodard notes this application is also paired with John Deere Operations Center.

The free tool gives forecasts for the area from the current day and up to the next three days. Ag-Analytics also gives users alerts when the National Weather Service provides a watch, alert, or warning.

Some counties can use FarmScope to analyze insurance forecasts by factoring soil, climate, and location. FarmScope also provides a yield and revenue forecast, providing confidence levels for different thresholds based on the field.

The other major free tool is FieldManager. FieldManager functions as a tracking system. It keeps track of planting history, water information, ownership information, soil types, and other variables in fields.

The company’s website is https://analytics.ag