FMC Digital Initiative Reinforces Retailer’s Need to Engage Channel Partners
June 6, 2020 As farmers continue their slow embrace of digital interaction with channel partners through systems like Bayer/Climate FieldView, Deere Operations Center, and a growing number of portals from retailers and distributors, the number of tools available to ride along on those systems is also increasing.
Basic manufacturers have been particularly aggressive on this front. In addition to Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva have significant programs and tools that incorporate in-house data science with collected field data to help service providers and farmers better predict, recognize, and appropriately treat for pest infestations. And in general, these efforts have worked to support the products and product categories they see as their flagship offerings.
The most recent addition to this lineup of offerings is the Arc Farm Intelligence Platform from manufacturer FMC. Slated to be available this summer, FMC calls Arc the “first mobile platform to use predictive modeling based on real-time data to help ensure the right crop protection products are applied precisely where and when they are needed to improve sustainability, optimize crop yield and enhance grower return on investment.”
“We look at what we are doing with precision application as an extension of who we are, and how we want to work with growers and the distribution channel,” says Brian Angeli, FMC’s Vice President, Corporate Strategy & Treasurer. “So we started working on our precision agriculture initiative in 2019 by looking at opportunities to deliver solutions where growers can make better informed decisions, and to support the use of FMC products.”
These days, FMC’s largest product segment is insecticides, so it’s no surprise that Arc will support this aspect of the company’s portfolio to start. “We have the broadest breadth in terms of application and market reach from a geographic and crop standpoint in this segment,” says Angeli.
The platform will utilize aggregated historical data, entomological models, hyper-local weather data, and real-time regional pest mapping to increase a grower’s confidence when making insect management decisions, according to a company press release. Arc will operate as an app for either Apple or Android. The opening salvo of target pests will include cotton bollworm, fall armyworm, and diamondback moth, among others, and will expand season over season.
Angeli stresses that they’re having ongoing discussions with larger channel partners to determine how best to make the information available to help decision making on the farms they work on. They also are committed to using an open API to channel the data through as many systems as possible. “We are not building our own ecosystem here,” says Angeli.
Technology is rapidly changing, and hopefully improving, the information we have at our disposal. This makes keeping up with how the technology is evolving, and how it impacts our farmers, our agronomy offerings, and the value we provide an increasingly important role we all play. It’s absolutely critical that we stay in close contact with our channel partners when it comes to technology tools and systems.
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