Combyne uses FieldView data to help market grain

Grain deliveries to be connected back to the fields they originated from and management choices made on those fields

Red Deer — Bayer is making it easier for farmers to track data from seeding to harvest, improving their ability to make better agronomic and marketing decisions.

The company recently announced producers can now connect their agronomic data in Climate FieldView with their marketing data in Combyne, which was acquired by the company early in 2023.

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“I mean, the reality is land is capped for the most part, so how do we produce more on the same piece of land? And data is obviously one of the ways to do it,” said James Humphris, digital account specialist lead for Bayer in Western Canada.

FieldView aims to simplify field data management for farmers by providing an online platform that can be accessed anywhere. It can unite data from each piece of precision farm equipment and makes the information more understandable through visualization and analysis tools.

The goal is to increase the ability of farmers to make informed decisions so they can maximize efficiency by reducing inputs while improving yields. “Obviously, the scariest part for farmers is ‘what do I do with all this data?’” said Humphris during an interview at the recent Agri-Trade Equipment Expo in Red Deer.

“Our platform tries to put that in a very simple and usable manner for growers to be able to make decisions on their farms — see what worked, what didn’t work — and one of the benefits I see, too, is once you start having multiple years of layers of data … you start having all that farm history of what happened on this field.”

Combyne is a digital platform founded in 2019 that helps farmers bring together and track crop marketing information ranging from grain storage balances to contracts, deliveries and settlements across multiple buyers, along with net overall marketed positions per crop. Bayer recently created an application interface that allows data to be shared between FieldView and Combyne, said Humphris.

Combyne is now able to incorporate in-field data from FieldView, which gives farmers a more accurate picture of current year harvest totals and projections for future years to enable them to easily update crop contract and storage positions, and help with up-to-date crop marketing decisions, said a statement by Bayer.

“Combyne also allows farmers to manage all their grain trade documents in one place so they have a clear view on their contractual commitments, delivery statuses, storage positions, and cash flow projects from grain sales, making it easier to manage contract risk and delivery logistics.”

Bayer acquired FieldView when it purchased Monsanto in 2017.

Humphris said the company sees such digital technologies as an inevitable advancement in the ability to practice farming that could help producers in a variety of ways, he said.

For example, farmers could more easily share their data with agronomists, improving their ability to quickly have informed discussions about the problems they are facing.

FieldView can help producers bring together vital data from a wide range of farm equipment, he said. “Our goal is to try to bring those different data points into one platform simply so they can use that data to make better decisions, put product where it should be … all those sorts of things that farmers can do, (such as) yield analysis – ultimately, trying to help farmers use their data better.”

The fact that FieldView can now work in tandem with Combyne offers several further advantages to producers, said Combyne Ag chief executive officer Alain Goubau.

“With accurate bushel quantities populating your marketed positions, you can better manage things such as how forward contracted you are, how much of your harvest is already committed, and where things stand when it comes to deliveries,” he said in the statement by Bayer.

“By working with FieldView, delivered grain outcomes in Combyne can eventually be connected back to the fields they originated from, and the management choices made on those fields, for better mapping of quality specs such as grade and dockage from delivered loads. This also lays the foundation for field-level probability insights — mapping actual revenue from sold crops against cost of production per field.”