Credit: Provided

Once again, Cornell is ahead of the curve in digital agriculture.

Ag-Analytics, a cloud-based application that provides digital agriculture analytics, has integrated its technology with the John Deere Operations Center, the manufacturer’s online platform.

Cornell is the first university to integrate with the John Deere Operations Center; Deere is the largest farm machinery manufacturer in the world. 

When farmers log into Ag-Analytics.Org, they can easily and securely integrate their data with the John Deere Operations Center with a few clicks. This allows farmers to securely use their high-resolution agriculture data in real time to extract more useful operations information with Ag-Analytics’ apps and tools. The secure service will provide farmers, at no cost, with better information with which to run their operations. And it works throughout the United States.

“This integration with the John Deere Operations Center is a first for any university, and will allow us to give value back to our farmers in pursuit of our university land-grant extension mission. It enables us to deliver relevant intelligence to our farmers quickly, and fully leverage university research in a way we could not before,” said Ag-Analytics founder and creator Josh Woodard, assistant professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“With the synergies between what it allows us to do in research and development and what it allows us to offer back to our farmers, it’s a win-win for everyone,” says Woodard. What’s more, as a land-grant university, Cornell assures the data is secure and farmers retain ownership of it. “Our primary goal is to better serve our farmers and bring them objective information based on cutting-edge research.”

Unlike other university programs, Woodard’s Ag-Analytics had an automated, secure and scalable platform that had the advanced technology in place to make the integration feasible. 

Ag-Analytics offers free tools including a crop insurance estimator, forecasting tools, and real-time yield and risk-management forecasts. Vast troves of soil, weather and satellite vegetation data are automatically linked to farmers’ fields through a user-friendly interface.

Most modern farm equipment comes with sensors that pick up a reading every meter or so, measuring the field’s productivity as the farmer plants, harvests, tills or does other work. The problem is, farmers don’t always have an easy way to make sense of this raw data. 

“That’s where we come in,” said Woodard, the Zaitz Family Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in Agricultural Finance and Business.

Ag-Analytics’ most useful tool is a field-specific crop insurance estimator, the only one of its kind.

The Federal Crop Insurance Corp. insures about 80 percent of U.S. acreage, covering $100 billion per year in liabilities.

Currently, farmers can find published crop insurance rates. But they don’t know exactly what their final premium will be until they report final acreage later in the season.

Ag-Analytics’ crop insurance tool allows farmers to run different scenarios based on their fields for different types of insurance, at any point in the season. For example, a farmer could see how her risk profile changes if she insures a few fields together or separately. The tool makes it easy for farmers to look at insurance costs for their fields and crops without manually loading data.

“Our integration with John Deere Operations Center allows us to give them back products that are valuable to them, but also to make better products in the future,” he said.

“Beyond our current tools, we also have many plans for the future, from developing new sustainability and conservation tools with partners like Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and the Environmental Defense Fund, to advanced variety analyses, and more,” Woodard said. “In terms of the land-grant role that we play, it’s really important we do this.”

Farmers can see a demo and sign up for the free tool at Ag-Analytics.Org.