Since Monsanto purchased the The Climate Corp. in 2013 for nearly $1 billion, the ensuring years have seen some dramatic changes in the precision farming landscape.

Venture capital money has flowed into data-driven start-up companies and the landscape has become increasingly competitive to attract farm customers who are looking for proven ROI to validate collection and analysis of farm information.

The Climate Corp. recently announced a partnership with Case IH on 2-way data sharing, which will provide real-time data transfer between the Advanced Farming Systems (AFS) and New Holland Precision Land Management (PLM) Connect platforms and Climate’s FieldView.

The agreement will increase connectivity between machines, to provide farmers with broader access to real-time, in-field data, says John Raines, senior vice president for Climate's Global Commercial businesses.

While proprietary hurdles still pose challenges to achieving true compatibility across all brands of equipment, Raines spoke on the steps Climate is working on to create a “data science warehouse” and tap into machine learning capabilities.

“We’re seeing that effort today, and by the way, that is tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment related to the data science warehouse, machine learning and the analytics and the algorithms that we built. But the output of that is what you are going to see from us, literally starting in 2018 and going forward. Advanced scripting and being able to take a field and being able to turn that field into management zones that not just are about soil type, but are about elevation, and elevation by soil type and understanding drainage and hydrology in that field and being able to discern which set of genetics to plant on it.”

Raines adds that additional steps will include tying artificial intelligence capabilities to improve nutrient management and pest and disease identification.