Climate Corp. Nixes Tillable Agreement: Will It Cast a Long Shadow on Trust in Data Sharing?
February 18, 2020 I’ve spent the last couple of months through editorials, stories, and even on camera in my weekly video noting the amount of productive collaboration that agriculture has experienced over the past year. I firmly believe that the only way farmers will be able to extract a measure of value from the field data they generate is if it’s movable and compatible with multiple systems. Otherwise, it’s an exercise in futility.
Flash forward to last week, and the events that led Climate Corp. to cut ties with digital farmland management startup Tillable in little more than 24 hours. Wow, what an absolute mess.
I, like many, followed the blow-by-blow events unfold on the popular old-school web forum AgTalk and, later on, in the Twitterverse from Thursday, February 13 through Friday the 14th and into the weekend.
I’ve been covering this industry for 20 years, and I understand very clear the undercurrents of mistrust and frustration of suppliers on the farmer side, and the challenge of creating and advancing ideas on the manufacturer side. Everyone walks a tightrope. But the volume of outrage and reaction to this caught me a bit by surprise, at least at first.
To help me break this down a bit, I called some friends in the industry for context who, for frankly good reason, preferred not to be identified. I’ll only mention here what I can confirm in an effort to put some of the pieces together.
Tillable, founded in 2017, was looking to disrupt the existing business structures between farmers and landlords. Their tactics took what were generally accepted as private and localized transactions and moved them squarely into the light of day, and opened them up to more scrutiny and competition. While basically everyone seems to agree what they were doing was above board and in the category of “somebody was going to do this eventually,” not everyone appreciates disruption.
With trust at the farmgate already on somewhat shaky ground, Tillable’s proposed API relationship with Climate announced in 2019 was certainly going to get scrutiny from farmers. And thanks to the combination of last year’s disastrous growing season and some aggressive marketing tactics through the off-season by Tillable, mistrust turned into outrage and accusation.
Farmers were receiving solicitations from Tillable reflecting specific knowledge of their farm, and recent transactions, that some recipients believed went beyond the capability of publicly available data. Last week, internet chatter revealed farmers trying to connect the dots between Tillable and Climate – Climate customers claimed that there was no way Tillable could have known what they knew without what they had shared with Climate. Farmers accused the two of back-door data trading.
In the background, those with knowledge of the pedigree of the founders of Tillable were aware of their Monsanto/Climate lineage – more logs for the growing fire.
Once those theories started getting floated on both social platforms, it was a feeding frenzy. Scores of farmers were waving letters from Tillable like torches and pitchforks, eventually arriving at the jail to take the accused to the town square for a public hanging. No matter that Climate, in a remarkable communique from President Mike Stern in the 5:00 hour on Friday evening, publicly pulled out of the Tillable project – the bodies were hanging high by sunset.
What happened was a perfect storm of events that fed existing mistrust and led to the unfortunate end to a business relationship. Again, I understand the sensitivities, but I also know that Climate would not purposely do anything to undermine Bayer’s massive market share in corn and soybeans for the sake of a data play. It’s not worth the loss of trust.
Some said Climate pulling out of the deal was an admission of guilt. I think Climate simply wants to try to regain farmer trust, even though it appears they did nothing to lose it. As I said in the opening, data that is incompatible and inflexible has very limited utility to the farmer. We need this stuff to talk to each other.
Loading ...Hopefully, there aren’t any more perfect storms of mistrust and outrage we’ll need to endure. The industry is making good progress, working to meet the demand of farmers who decry the lack of compatibility across equipment. Here’s hoping we can move on, and move forward.
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