Monsanto Acquisition

Monsanto announced the purchase of The Climate Corporation - a six-year-old company that sells weather-related insurance and also gathers data to document and predict weather events. Kerry Preete - Monsanto's Vice President of Global Strategy - expressed the company's goal of doubling agricultural production by 2030 with less inputs. He explained the role the acquisition could take in accomplishing that objective.

PREETE: Business data sciences provide insights that are transforming other industries like manufacturing, the medical industry, transportation and several other industries; we see the potential innovations around data science that will help farmers meet the rapid growing global demand for the crops that they produce.

The Climate Corporation has rapidly scaled up to offering products and services for over a million acres of farmland worldwide. Work allows them to do Hyper-Local weather monitoring, Simulating Weather Events and Agronomic Modeling that allow the corporation to predict farm-level outcomes - based on weather events, farming practices and other key variables. Davied Friedberg is The Climate Corporation's CEO.

FRIEDBERG: This competency represents the intersection of agronomy, data science and several other disciplines and we think that we are fairly unique in this area of research and development. Data driven, agronomic modeling allows us to - for example - predict a yield for a given field based on different weather outcomes, planting dates, soil types and crop farming practices.

That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.