Collecting data with today's modern farm equipment is frankly easy. You fire up the monitor, the machine, check to make sure implements are properly hooked up and work. The technology grabs and stores the data. And there's the rub, that word 'store.' Monitors are holding that information for you to get to later, but then what?

The Climate Corporation has been working on agreements for the past few years lining up data sharing deals with John Deere, Agco and the most recent, CNH, which provides data sharing capability to the Climate FieldView system through the FieldView Drive. This new partnership goes farther with CNH brand dealers marketing the FieldView Drive and App for farmer use.

"First, and foremost, we have connectivity with the FieldView Drive and the application with some CNH equipment," said John Raines, senior vice president, global commercial, The Climate Corporation. "This greatly enhances the overall compatibility standpoint across all CNH machinery including harvesters, tractors pulling planters, sprayers and spreaders. It opens up those implements as well as the global markets."

Beyond the basics

The FieldView Drive is an ISOBUS connection device that links into a machine's systems and captures information. The company reverse-engineers the data stream from a machine to make sense of it for the FieldView software, if there's no agreement. With this deal, CNH will unlock their proprietary data stream for Climate access from both the AFS and PLM systems supported by the company.

Raines is quick to note that "as always, the farmer will own his data." He noted that farmers must opt-in to share information into the system and that when they do, they continue to manage the information. "And once they opt in, it will be available for them to do something with in the FieldView system."

Essentially there are two data streams - machine data showing operational information like speed, operating hours, speed, and other basic information that CNH uses now to enhance product design; the second is an agronomic stream of information such as as-applied map data, or yield map data.

Added David Larson, head of precision solutions and telematics systems and service, CNH Industrial: "This partnership comprises opt-in two-way data sharing through the Climate FieldView platform and offers one of the highest levels of integration and interaction in the market today."

This is a real-time stream - provided the farm has the cellular bandwidth during operation. This allows a FieldView customer to check in on how machines are at work. Raines has used the system on his own farm, noting he makes a request while sitting in a meeting to a tractor in the field and the operator gets a pop-up on the screen requesting access. "He hits OK and I can see his machine at work with only seconds of delay," he said.

Making connections

Raines noted that Climate has 20-plus platform partners and this CNH agreement - which is a multi-year deal - links the company to all major brands - John Deere, Agco, Case IH and New Holland. In addition to the data linkage, the CNH deal goes a little farther.

"CNH dealers are going to be global partners selling the FieldView Drive and the FieldView app, which broadens our market tremendously," Raines said. "This enhances the support and the ability for farmers to receive value from the data and insights they get as these implements move across the field."

For Raines, the key is getting that data into a platform where a farmer can make in-season decisions. "My big deal is this, I've been with the data science program of Monsanto since 2011 and we've been looking prospectively at the crop in real time, in-season, while you can still impact the crop this year," he said.

Climate is also expanding into new markets including South America and Europe, and this new agreement will give the company easier access to data collection through the CNH brands.