Two new catchphrases that are extremely popular in the business community today are “data is the new gold” or “data is the new oil.” They highlight the importance and value of data for businesses. However, unlike gold or oil, the supplies of which are limited, massive amounts of data are generated by business operations across industries, and it is growing exponentially. When data is collected and simply stored, it creates no value. It must be made accessible to the people who need it and made available when they need it. It should be presented in the right format for them to understand it.
The quality of data is also important. It must be complete, unbiased, accurate, and up to date. Enterprises that capture data from a variety of sources have an upper hand. Analysis of the data can provide powerful insights to drive informed agronomic decisions like soil fertility, irrigation management, weed control, etc, and advance business resilience rapidly as compared to companies that use traditional methods of decision-making. Enterprises that mine data successfully to arrive at actionable insights can become leaders in their industry and outperform competitors.
Turning data into a high-performing asset
Data is critical for crop protection companies to develop plant protection products and optimize existing ones. However, the large volume of data generated by research and field trials makes farm data management a challenging task. Additionally, data silos can form within companies, making it difficult to share information and knowledge across departments. Cropin recently conducted an internal study on the agricultural value chain. Crop protection companies stated that currently 61% of data is collected while 54% is analyzed across the business value chain. In 2024, an average of 90% of data is predicted to be both collected and analyzed.
Driving remote farm monitoring and resource optimization with intelligent cloud platform
Digitization of the data collection, management, and analysis process can drive remote farm monitoring and optimize resource utilization. The automated workflows enabled by digitization can speed up data collection, plug data loss and manipulation, while ensuring accuracy. Further, the data so collated can be integrated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models to derive data-driven actionable insights.
Integrated intelligent cloud platform Cropin Cloud offers Cropin Apps to automate data collection, address data-related challenges, and provide real-time visibility into data quality. Cropin Data Hub can interface with all types of agri-data sources such as from IoT devices and agricultural drones, in-field farm management apps, remote sensors, satellite imagery, mechanization data from farming equipment, and weather advisory sources. It processes data inputs with metadata to solve for search and query needs and creates contextual custom reports and visualizations for easy access and use for the field teams, farmers, and other stakeholders. Cropin Data Hub’s prebuilt advanced data frameworks can combine agronomy, enterprise, and remote field data with Cropin’s crop intelligence datasets and models to deliver significant insights and value for companies.
Breaking down data silos using Cropin Cloud
Automated tools can aggregate and streamline data from fields and research centers to make the data supply chain more effective and efficient. Advanced analytical tools also open up the opportunity to gather new insights into crop protection trends and patterns. Efficient management of data enables Crop protection companies to develop new products, optimize existing ones, reduce their time to market, crop disease management and help with accurate crop protection demand sensing. Strengthened with the above benefits of farm digitization, the study anticipates crop protection companies to increase revenue generation by 18% while reducing costs by 21% within the next two years.
Cropin Data Hub supports crop protection companies to build data moats with their proprietary data to create competitive advantage and power growth. Data can be centralized on the platform to build operational advantage by making it understandable and accessible to all and break down data silos. Predictive intelligence generated through mature machine learning and AI models on Cropin Cloud can enable dynamic decision-making off and on the field.
Agriculture data analysis for powerful insights using Cropin Cloud
Cropin’s study reveals that crop protection companies have just started leveraging agriculture technologies to augment their business processes. Among all technologies, data analytics has seen widespread implementation (38%), followed by automation (24%), sensors/IoT (12%), and AI (6%). This can be partly attributed to the dearth of expensive digital talent and the need to deploy an integrated cloud platform that allows democratization.
Crop protection companies must embrace advanced digital technologies to make their farm to fork process truly intelligent. The safe, secure, and scalable platform can integrate with internal and external solutions and enable them to connect with each other. By deploying Cropin Cloud, seed protection companies can access the world’s largest crop knowledge graph created with trillions of farm pixel datasets. With growing adoption of the Cropin platform, this crop knowledge graph is continuously multiplying and growing in time and space.
Responsible ESG reporting
The crop protection industry is highly regulated given its impact on consumers and the environment. Measuring key performance indicators for environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals is a priority for companies. Accurate and efficient performance reporting and meeting regulatory compliance requires data integrity. In this regard, companies need to put in place robust data foundations and quality standards for the success of their ESG and regulatory compliance initiatives.
By adopting a secure and scalable platform and a meaningful strategy for data integration, governance, quality, and enrichment, crop protection businesses can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of reporting. Cropin Data Hub delivers the power of unified data with ML-ready data pipelines for increased transparency, trust, accountability, and enhanced analytics that seamlessly link to ESG metrics and goals.
Innovative agriculture Cloud technology to proactively plan and strategize
The crop protection industry is at the crossroads. With digital at its core, it can tap the opportunity to proactively re-imagine and strategize plans for future growth. Cropin Cloud is a first-of-its-kind integrated platform for agriculture that can accelerate business growth and bring about far-reaching and rapid digital transformation across the Crop protection ecosystem. Disparate data points from various solutions can be collated by Cropin Data Hub on Cropin Cloud by Crop protection companies. This can be used by AI/ML models to derive data-driven insights to drive future goals.
