The Washington, D.C.-based American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) on Monday announced it had reached memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with equipment firms Agco and Kubota on allowing the so-called “right to repair.”

The MOUs, reached separately with each company, follow similar pacts the AFBF made in January with Deere and Co. and in March with CNH, the maker of Case IH and New Holland equipment.

READ MORE: Deere agrees to independent equipment servicing

The agreements lay out a framework under which farmers and independent repair facilities in all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico would be able to access Agco and Kubota manuals, tools, product guides and information to self-diagnose and self-repair machines.

The pact also provides for support from the manufacturers to directly purchase or lease diagnostic tools and order products and parts. Farmers or independent repair shops would be able to obtain specialized tools, software or documentation from authorized repair shops on “fair and reasonable terms” via subscription or sale.

Barry O’Shea, vice-president for customer support at Agco — whose brands include Massey Ferguson, Fendt and Challenger — said in AFBF’s release that “Agco’s farmer-first focus guides us in everything we do, and we support farmers’ ability to repair the equipment they own.”

Todd Stucke, senior vice-president of marketing for Kubota, said in the same release that the company, through its dealer network, makes shop tools, parts, guides and manuals available to owners who choose to work directly on their machines.

“We strive to ensure that our equipment is manufactured to the highest engineering standards to maximize performance for our customers, and this agreement is a good step toward further protecting their safety while operating, maintaining and repairing it,” Stucke said.

The agreements emphasize that the manufacturer isn’t obliged to divulge any trade secrets, nor to allow farmers or independents to override equipment safety features or emissions controls, nor to sell tools, software or documents that either never existed or are no longer available to either the company or its authorized repair sites.

Taken together with the Deere and CNH MOUs, AFBF said the four agreements cover about 70 per cent of the farm machinery sold in the U.S.

“Farmers and ranchers urged us to find a private sector-solution to the challenges of repairing their own equipment,” AFBF president Zippy Duvall said in the same release. “These agreements represent ongoing efforts to ensure farmers have access to the tools necessary to keep their equipment running, and to keep food on the table for families across America.”

The MOUs with Agco and Kubota both took effect as of May 17. They also commit the companies and AFBF to meet at least semi-annually to assess how the MOUs are working and suggest changes as needed.

The MOUs also allow for the AFBF or either company to withdraw on delivery of written notice, but the parties agree to “co-operate in good faith” to schedule a meeting within 30 days of that notice to discuss the “ongoing viability” of the MOU.

The MOUs’ “intended beneficiaries” are farmers in the 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico; neither agreement mentions any commitment to provide the same services to farmers outside U.S. territory. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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As the agriculture sector accelerates its adoption of technology, the reliance on high-tech machinery such as GPS-guided combines and tractors has become more commonplace.

But equipment makers such as Deere have generally required customers to use their parts and service divisions for repairs and until recently, only allowed authorized dealers the means and tools to access the complex computerized systems of their tractors and other machinery.

The Farm Bureau’s memorandum of understanding with Deere “will ensure farmers everywhere are able to repair our own equipment,” Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall said, speaking at the federation’s convention in Puerto Rico.

“This will enable you and your independent mechanics to identify and fix problems,” he said. “You will have access to the diagnostic tools and information you need. And you’ll get it at a fair and reasonable price.”

Dave Gilmore, Deere’s vice-president of ag and turf marketing, said the company looks forward to working with the farm group and “our customers in the months and years ahead to ensure farmers continue to have the tools and resources to diagnose, maintain and repair their equipment.”

The MOU aims to find a solution to the “right to repair” debate in the private sector, rather than through legislation or regulation, according to the document. It benefits farmers and independent repair facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico, for the “lawful operation and upkeep of Agricultural Equipment,” the MOU states.

The MOU states that, among other things, equipment owners and independent technicians cannot compromise any safety measures and protocols on the equipment; that Deere’s intellectual property, including its software, are protected from infringement; and no federal and state emissions control requirements can be compromised because of modifications made to the machinery.

The “right-to-repair” movement has gained steam as input costs have surged in recent years — as has the price of repairs.

For Deere and rival equipment manufacturers such as CNH and Agco, repairing machinery has given them a solid boost for their parts and services business. Consumers have filed a slew of lawsuits against Deere over the issue, and the Biden administration has been pushing for more competition in the rural economy amid rising inflation.

Duvall said Farm Bureau officials will meet regularly with Deere to discuss “solutions to the challenges farmers are facing in repairing their equipment” and said he hoped other farm equipment makers would take similar steps.

— P.J. Huffstutter reports on agriculture and agribusiness for Reuters from Chicago.

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In a world with a dwindling number of grain producers and a growing population, Deere and its rivals are developing self-driving equipment loaded with the latest software that is harvesting a new kind of bumper crop: data. All that translates into recurring revenue, something companies such as Apple have long enjoyed and industrial manufacturers like Deere hungrily eye.

“The more technology we can develop to allow farmers to get productivity out of their land without having to spend so much money on fertilizer and inputs, the better off everybody is,” Julian Sanchez, Deere’s director of emerging technology, told Reuters.

Investments in automation for high-horsepower equipment is only at its inception for Deere and rivals Agco and CNH Industrial. The next step is to equip machines to plant seeds using satellite imagery and soil data, Sanchez said.

While Deere has not outlined what that could mean to its bottom line, last fall U.S. automaker General Motors said it was targeting up to $25 billion in software-driven services by 2030, and added its Cruise self-driving unit could achieve $50 billion in annual revenue within six years (all figures US$).

The race among farm equipment companies to automate agriculture has accelerated amid a burgeoning food crisis. And Deere’s strategy around scaling its suite of tech products is now in the spotlight, after the manufacturer’s stock plunged 14 per cent on May 20 following a quarterly revenue miss. It was the biggest drop for Deere in 14 years.

The timing comes as the war in Ukraine and widespread drought in key grain-producing countries have roiled commodity markets, causing grain and farm input prices to spike as supplies shrink. That, in turn, has U.S. farmers scrambling to boost crop yields, yet limit their fertilizer and pesticide use.

That and a shrinking farm labor workforce has opened the door for Deere and others to make their high-tech push. For farmers, the prize is higher crop yields. For Illinois-based Deere, it’s the revenue.

Autonomous machinery is where Deere is placing its bet as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated in farming. Its self-driving 8R tillage tractor will be the latest addition to the company’s algorithm-enabled offerings when the green machines go on sale in the fall.

The new tractor will be priced at $500,000. However, the autonomy feature will be sold separately. Deere executives told analysts at a conference that the company will largely maintain its “point-of-sale” model for equipment, but will integrate a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for its autonomous solutions. That will likely include their self-driving tractor.

“While it may take us a few years to build out a base of recurring revenues, autonomous solutions, on top of our underlying machine forms, will be recurring,” said Joshua Jepsen, Deere’s deputy financial officer.

The recurring revenue model can be economically favorable to heavy machinery manufacturers “based on those data insights,” said Michael Staebe, a Bain and Co. partner focused on machinery.

In Deere’s case, using a subscription model by either selling or leasing its driverless tractor can result in higher margins.

“After expenses, every incremental dollar falls straight to the bottom line,” Edward Jones analyst Matt Arnold said. “We would expect it to be an attractive offering to farmers given the efficiency it offers them, and lucrative to Deere.”

Agronomic data helps bottom line

Farmers have long been wary about how machinery and supplier firms profit off the data gleaned from their operations, and how secure such data is. But with farmers facing economic pressures, Deere and other manufacturers said it is easier to sell farmers on making such investments.

One key reason: The ability to glean crop insights from huge amounts of agronomic data takes the guesswork out of when to plant and how many seeds to use — which saves farmers money.

“Everybody in the industry is much more data-focused than we have ever seen them,” said Michael Boehlje, a professor at Purdue University. “(Companies) can do profit projections by geographic space in fields. That takes you to a different level of thinking and analysis.”

In 2020, Deere acquired Harvest Profit, a farm profitability software company that has been integrated into the John Deere Operations Center. The platform stores and lets farmers access their machine data from the cloud.

“When I look at what precision ag has done for our operations and what we can accomplish in a day’s time compared to 10 to 20 years ago, it’s so much easier,” said Jeremy Jack, a row-crop farmer in Mississippi and chief executive of Silent Shade Planting Co.

Ron Heck’s fleet of Case IH combines and tractors are equipped with automated steering to harvest his 4,000 acres where he rotates soybeans and corn.

The fourth-generation farmer in Iowa said some of his new equipment is loaded with technology. “Unfortunately for us it costs more, but hopefully the costs will be paid back in the long run by better efficiency.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Bianca Flowers and Joseph White.

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Telus Agriculture and Rabo AgriFinance, which is headquartered in St. Louis and serves U.S. farm customers, announced Monday they’ve jointly bought software firm Conservis for an undisclosed sum.

Conservis comes to the joint venture already handling farmers’ financial reporting data via the Rabo AgriFinance platform since 2018, along with data from Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform, the John Deere Operations Center and Crop Data Management Systems’ crop chemical database.

The Minneapolis company’s products are meant to allow a farmer to integrate as-applied and yield data directly from those platforms into a “unified view” of the business, with “no extra hardware or manual data re-entry required.”

Thus, “with all your activity records in one spot, you can decide to share reports with landowners, regulators and lenders using data directly from your fields at any point in the season,” Conservis says on its website.

“Understanding your true cost, including cost per bushel and per acre will help ensure you make informed decisions that yield higher profits.”

Calgary-based Telus Agriculture has been shopping for farm management platforms since before Telus created the new ag unit last year, among them Decisive Farming, Farm At Hand, Muddy Boots and Feedlot Health Management Services.

The joint owners said their vision for Conservis is to deliver an “even more robust” platform across a “diverse range of crops and livestock.”

For its part, Telus Ag’s existing tech portfolio is expected to “help enhance the Conservis platform’s functionality” and include access to Telus’ Agricultural Data Exchange (ADX) and Agricultural Services platform (ASX).

The new owners said they “remain committed to Conservis’ strict data privacy standards,” emphasizing farmers on Conservis will still own their data and will still control when partners — Rabobank and Telus Ag included — get that information. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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John Deere on Nov. 12 announced it has acquired Fargo-based Harvest Profit for an undisclosed sum.

Harvest Profit — whose software was already integrated with the John Deere Operations Center system, as well as Climate FieldView and Agrimatics Libra Cart — will “retain its brand name” under Deere ownership, the company said in a release.

Harvest Profit’s current software offering will continue to be available through the John Deere Operations Center, Deere said. The acquisition “ensures current and prospective John Deere customers will have access to this analytical capability and provides them with continuity moving forward.”

That said, “Harvest Profit has and will continue to have API (application programming interface) connections with other farm management information systems,” Lane Arthur, Deere’s vice-president for data-applications and analytics, added via email.

Harvest Profit customers, he said, “have the choice to use the solution that best meets their needs.”

Just in August, Harvest Profit had announced “enhanced integration” with Bayer-owned Climate FieldView, which previously allowed the two systems to share information on fields and boundaries, but now also allows transfers of “as-applied data,” such as at plantings, sprayings and harvests.

First set up in 2015, Harvest Profit has said its products are meant to give farmers “more visibility into the financial side of your farm… making it easier for you to track your farm’s costs, profits, grain marketing positions and inventory.

“Spreadsheets are amazing tools that we are huge fans of, but they aren’t well-suited to the complex task of managing all of the inputs and outputs of a modern farm.”

Harvest Profit’s software “provides financial visibility for the customer of their operations enabling confident and proactive management decisions that make them more profitable and sustainable,” Arthur said in Deere’s release.

The Fargo company’s products, he said, “will provide John Deere customers with a forward-looking financial lens, better visibility into their farms’ profitability, and insights to help them make the best possible decisions managing their operations.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Winnipeg-based AGI announced Thursday it has bought all outstanding shares in Oakville, Ont.-based Affinity Management Ltd., developer of the Compass brand of farm and agribusiness management software, among other business management tools.

Affinity, which was founded by Neal Dilawri in 2007 and built up through partnership with chemical firm BASF, today has 18 employees. Dilawri will now take a “senior leadership role” working on the AGI SureTrack platform and provide “vision and guidance” going forward, AGI said.

The Compass product line, which today serves over 8,000 individual farmers across North America, includes an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for growers and ag retailers and an agronomy tool, AGI said.

The ERP system “provides full accounting functionality, including management of accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll and inventory tracking.”

The Compass system, AGI said, “also acts as a central data repository and portal which allows for the sharing of information with a grower’s trusted advisors, including agronomists, accountants, lenders, and insurance providers.”

Affinity’s staff also includes accountants who provide bookkeeping services to the company’s grower customers, AGI said.

The Compass product suite is “highly complementary to AGI’s current offering and will be a key component of the full AGI SureTrack platform.”

The SureTrack platform, formerly known as Intellifarms, includes the SureTrack Farm system for use by farmers and the SureTrack Pro system for use by processors, merchandisers and grain buyers to source product directly from farms.

The platform is meant to bring together data from “across the farm, providing our customers with the ability to manage their crop production, manage their overall business, and market their grain based on content and robust traceability,” AGI CEO Tim Close said in Thursday’s release.

Compass, he said, “takes AGI SureTrack to the next level, adding comprehensive ERP capabilities for AGI dealers and agriculture retailers, and significantly adding to our offering for farmers.”

In an update Thursday on its fourth-quarter financials, AGI said it has “demonstrated the success of its AGI SureTrack subscription model” in 2019, by “increasing retail equivalent sales by 70 per cent, despite capacity constraints and a challenging U.S. ag market.”

In 2020, the company added, “that growth is expected to continue as AGI builds on existing relationships with processors, merchandisers, grain buyers and producers throughout North America.”

Investments in sales, marketing and technical resources for AGI SureTrack are meant to “address capacity and accelerate the future pace of new user additions, thereby increasing our recurring revenue stream and adding significant equipment cross-sell opportunities.”

Financial terms of AGI’s deal for Affinity weren’t disclosed in Thursday’s release, except to say the purchase was “funded from the company’s operating facilities.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Farm At Hand, which makes the cloud-based Crop Planner software suite for farmers and the Farm At Hand Agronomy suite for agronomists, announced Tuesday it has been wholly acquired by Telus for an undisclosed sum.

Few specifics of the deal were available last week, though Farm At Hand on Tuesday described it as “a natural fit” toward its goal to “simplify complicated tools to be user-friendly and match how you plan, work and keep track of what’s happening on your farm.”

Working with Telus, it said, will further that goal “by making Farm At Hand the hub that links together leading-edge software and IoT devices.”

IoT, or Internet of Things, refers to connected physical devices, such as farm equipment and crop monitoring systems, sharing data over networks without human involvement.

Farm At Hand recently announced it would work with tech firm Agrimatics to connect that company’s Libra Cart grain cart display and data management system with Farm At Hand account, and in May it announced integration with Deere’s MyJohnDeere system.

Through the Telus deal, Farm At Hand said Tuesday, it will be “better able to alert you to key changes, and offer advanced tools and information — a way of keeping track of everything in one central platform.”

Both companies emphasized last week that nothing will change immediately in Farm At Hand’s operations.

A Telus spokesperson said the Vancouver-based telecom firm “will continue Farm At Hand’s proven commitment to helping farmers best manage their farms, adding new features and services in the future.”

Farm At Hand, on its website, said its customers will “still have access to the tools you rely on,” adding “one of the things that we love about Telus is their approach to data transparency and privacy. They too believe farmers should own their information and be empowered to choose who they share it with.”

Asked whether Farm At Hand’s operations will directly connect to Telus’ in the future, the Telus representative said “we’re always looking at emerging areas where we can leverage data and technology to spur innovation, help organizations be more productive and improve the lives of Canadians.”

Telus — which provides consumer and business phone, cellular, broadband and cable service across Canada — said it “has long partnered with farmers to help connect, track and modernize farms and welcoming Farm at Hand to the Telus family will further that effort.”

Farm At Hand was founded in 2012 in Saskatchewan and relocated its operations to Vancouver the following year. In 2015 it became an arm of Winnipeg-based grain marketing consultancy FarmLink Marketing Solutions; co-founders Kim Keller and Himanshu Singh left the company the following year. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The partnership was announced May 10 and the team will be led by John Wiebe, business development manager for IMV Technologies.

Why it matters: Management software for hog farmers is important, especially as record-keeping becomes more of a quality assurance imperative.

The Ontario and Alberta Pork Congress were the first main events to promote the new collaboration.

“The whole point of us being (at the Ontario Pork Congress) is to answer questions, to help people find out what has been happening with PigCHAMP over the last few years,” says Wiebe.

Vet offices across the country were previously selling the program, but it was pulled more than five years ago because veterinarians wanted to focus on being vets and PigCHAMP felt confident in servicing all North American customers from Iowa. Some veterinarians also switched to using competing software.

“Clients were coming in and we were able to support them from Iowa, but even though we speak the same language, it was getting to be more difficult,” says Jayne Jackson, product and sales manager with PigCHAMP in Iowa.

“We create and design the product for our customers and it varies; different countries do different things. To help us understand that and guide us through those things, we need someone locally and I think EastGen is a great fit.

“PigCHAMP approached (EastGen); Jayne and I talked about it amongst ourselves. We are not competing against each other in any way, we are already in the industry and we know everybody in the industry. It is a good fit.”

About 250 pork producers across Canada use the program software, which has been in Canada for more than 20 years.

The swine software has packages for reproduction and farrow to finish. The app allows the program to be accessed through a mobile or handheld device.

“Most of the software systems that are out there are primarily online and single database. We provide the option for our clients to be online with their own database, not a consolidated database,” says Jackson.

“Pretty much everything can be tracked; it’s all productivity related,” says Jackson. “We have a wide spectrum of clients — thousands and thousands of sows, niche markets, 10 sow operations — we wanted to give them the power to be able to customize their system.”

“(Producers can say) ‘this is what I want and need.’ Based on their feedback, we sit down and we design our products. The impact is from our clients, our clients tell us what to do.”

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That lack of trust can be warranted. According to some data law experts, ownership ambiguity can have real-world consequences for farmers, custom applicators, landlords, and data companies themselves.

Why it matters: Data-intensive software systems often come with lengthy and complex user agreements, many of which do not explicitly state who has usage and ownership rights of the data generated from the farm. Farmers need to know who owns the data and how it might be used before they sign on the dotted line.

Long and ambiguous contracts

“Some of the most exciting calls I get are from a new client saying ‘we have some new ag technology but we have no idea what sort of contracts we need in order to get farmers to sign up,” said Todd Janzen, an American attorney and co-founder of Janzen Agricultural Law LLC, a law firm serving farmers, ag technology providers and agribusinesses. Janzen also serves as the administrator for the Ag Data Transparent project, a United States non-profit effort to bring transparency to contracts between farmers and technology providers.

In a presentation to big-data developers and researchers at a conference in Houston, Texas, Janzen said most of the legal industry both in and outside the U.S. creates new service and product contracts by using pre-existing and readily available legal templates.

Agriculture data, however, “is a different type of commodity than the data you have on Facebook or Twitter,” meaning standard user agreements should not be used to the same effect. Despite this, the contracts employed by companies offering data services to farmers usually look similar to those required for modern smartphones.

“There’s pages and pages you have to scroll through and accept just to use your phone… which doesn’t have any benefit for the farmer and makes the trust issue even worse,” he said.

Is agriculture data considered property?

Janzen pointed out that long, confusing contracts are not necessarily indicative of malicious intent on the part of the data service provider. Part of the issue, he says, comes from ambiguity at the top legislative level of the U.S. and other countries.

Janzen said data is not a material thing and the concept of data ownership is therefore very different from owning a house or a car. The lack of a creative element also means ag data does not fit with intellectual property classifications, specifically as a patent, trademark, or copyright.

Ag data more closely matches the definition of trade secret — information that derives economic value because it’s not generally known to the public — but even that, Janzen said, comes with difficulties and has yet to be solidly determined.

In the overall case of the United States, therefore, Janzen says farmers do not own their data under current law.

Another question posed by Janzen asked whether the U.S. has regulations that could apply to ag data. While statutes protecting personal data like financial information exist, there is nothing for ag data. However, Janzen says something like the European Union’s recently introduced code of conduct for ag data — an initiative designed to ensure the transparent and fair sharing of agricultural data — might serve as an initial template.

“There are no laws that specifically protect ag data in the United States, which means as a lawyer you better make sure the contracts are really clear and people have an understanding of who owns what in those contracts” said Janzen.

Addressing data control

Janzen also stressed the importance of clarifying who controls data, as well as who owns it.

“There are companies out there that say ‘yes, you own the data,’ but when you read the agreements you find out that they have an unlimited licence to do whatever they want with the data. They own it from the standpoint that they can do whatever they want with it,” he said.

“You can be the owner of a car but if you give a teenager the keys and they go out and wreck it, it doesn’t really matter that you own the car, it matters who was in control of the car when it was wrecked.”

Janzen provided examples where ownership and control ambiguity could cause potential problems.

• Landlord, tenant, and custom applicator relationships: A custom harvester has paid for access to a software system that generates a yield map for a field. The farmer working that field rents the land from a landlord. Whether the farmer or landlord have any right to that information, or where it can go, is unclear, sometimes even if stated in the user agreement signed by the custom harvester. This may also apply to direct landlord-tenant relationships.
• Divorce: One party wants to use ag data to assess the value of farm assets.
• Land sales: When a person or company sells land, the data for that land may or may not go as part of that sale.
• Sale of ag data service provider: If the software company itself is purchased, the data held by that company goes as part of that sale. The purchasing entity may not have the same data-ownership policy.
• Value to data generator: Primary producers generate data and send it further up the value chain, yet receive no relevant business management benefits or financial compensation for doing so. A lawsuit covering this issue is currently ongoing within the American poultry industry.

Many of these questions, Janzen says, are an explicit focus of the Ag Data Transparent initiative, which operates as a certification program. Potential data-system users can see independent, easy-to-understand evaluations of company software systems.

However, Janzen reiterated that Ag Data Transparent does not exist to change the ownership and control policies of the participating companies, just to educate people on what they’re buying into.

Options for resolving ownership questions

Just how the question of ownership will be resolved is unknown and jurisdictional differences in how that process develops may be varied. Overall, though, more federal regulation is a possibility, Janzen said.

In the U.S., that would likely mean intervention by Congress after a major problem has arisen, something similar to Facebook’s data breech with Cambridge Analytics, for example. Janzen also says there may be opportunities to link medical and financial data, which are already protected, with ag data.

“In Europe, the general data protection regulation doesn’t specifically apply to ag data, but it could if the ag data is linked with personal information, which it is in many systems,” he says.

Another option, and the one currently in use across much of the western world, is industry self-regulation.

“Most of the contracts that are out there are still kind of messy. They’re not easy for farmers to actually read. At the end of the day, if we did nothing the free market will sort itself out,” said Janzen.

“If nobody really cares about the ownership issues we will see that in the marketplace. I don’t know.”

Compromise may play a role in regulation

Janzen believes the concept of ag data sits squarely between the extremes of openly accessible social media information and highly protected medical and financial information. It’s something that many want to use and share to improve everything from traceability to farm productivity, but elements of privacy and proprietary rights linger.

At the end of Janzen’s conference presentation, a farmer and founder of a data information services co-operative based in Lubbock, Texas, provided the last word.

“The farmers I know, we’re at a place where we just want insights. You don’t have to pay me $100 for that data. Let’s get some insights that we can take back and make some real money with. I don’t want a $1 an acre, I want $5 an acre, $50 an acre. I really think that’s what data can do for us,” he said.

“When someone authors data, and say, an agronomist takes my yield data and authors something, he’s got a right in that. We’re never going to move this industry if growers say ‘I own the raw data so you can’t use that.’ There’s got to be some balance here.”

Do Canadian farmers own their data?

According to Karen Hand, researcher in applied biostatistics and research director for the University of Guelph’s Food from Thought program — an initiative focused on using big data to benefit agriculture and biodiversity — Canadian farmers are in a similar place as their counterparts south of the border.

Canadian law does not consider data to be physical or intellectual property. Like in the United States, this means inherent data ownership is not guaranteed. Similarly, statutes and other regulations that could protect farmer data, like privacy requirements for financial information, do not exist.

Hand also says the Ag-Data Transparent initiative started by Janzen and his colleagues in the U.S. has started making inroads within Canada. Farm Credit Canada was the first Canadian company to become compliant with the initiative’s transparency requirements, specifically for its AgExpert farm management software and requiring the same from any business it partners with.

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DuPont — which as of last week had all regulatory approvals and clearances lined up to complete its merger with Dow Chemical — announced Wednesday it has signed a deal to buy software firm Granular, Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Granular, set up in 2014, now serves growers covering nearly two million acres in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Its products include its Farm Management Software (FMS) line and, in the U.S., AcreValue.com, which it bills as “the leading digital marketplace for farmland real estate.”

DuPont executive vice-president James Collins, in a release, described the deal for Granular as “an important component of our commitment to leading and shaping the ag tech market.”

Specifically, DuPont said Wednesday it’s creating a “digital agriculture ecosystem to support information sharing, services and commerce.”

Buying Granular, the company said, “will enable the business to connect growers, analytics and public and private data to advance our vision for a digitally connected, more sustainable agriculture industry.”

Collins hailed Granular as “a clear market leader, as evidenced by its rapidly growing customer base and its existing partnerships with agriculture industry leaders, such as the recently announced integration of Granular into John Deere’s Operation Center.”

Granular’s affiliations other than Deere include Precision Planting, the planting equipment arm of Monsanto subsidiary The Climate Corp. Farm equipment manufacturer Agco last month announced an unrelated deal to buy Precision Planting for an undisclosed sum.

DuPont’s takeover of Granular is expected to close in DuPont’s third quarter. Granular CEO and co-founder Sid Gorham then becomes head of digital agriculture for DuPont, an arm that also includes DuPont’s Encirca agronomic software business.

“I am confident that as part of DuPont we will make a bigger impact even faster. DuPont shares our vision for using technology to help farms improve their dollar yield, not just their bushel yield,” Gorham said in DuPont’s release.

Granular’s advisory board today includes a Prairie producer as one of two non-U.S. members. Kristjan Hebert, managing partner of Hebert Grain Ventures (HGV) at Moosomin, Sask., is also board chairman for Global Ag Risk Solutions and a member of Bayer Cropscience’s Grower Advisory Forum.

DuPont and Dow recently agreed to close their merger deal effective Aug. 31, at which point they plan to spin off their combined seed and crop protection businesses into a separate company. — AGCanada.com Network

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