Data for Farmland Acquisition

Data for Farmland Acquisition

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
It’s time for the Farm of the Future Report. I’m Tim Hammerich.

As agriculture becomes increasingly more digital, everyone is talking about data. This is true for farm management, but it’s also true for farmland acquisition. Farmland investment platform FarmTogether hired Kit Barron, who has a background with The Climate Corp, to be their head of automation and artificial intelligence. Barron says his knowledge of farm data has been helpful when analyzing land to acquire.

Barron… “Doing some data sleuthing and data, what we like to call data munging or data wrangling, figuring out new data sets that we think would help us make better decisions, more timely decisions. Figuring out how to get that into our data warehouse and work really closely with our engineering team on that. So that's a quick snapshot and what I'm engaged in right now.”

Barron says the most difficult data for him to track down for his due diligence is well-structured historical production prices.

Barron… “In the row crop space that's becoming better and better. When we come to specialty crops and permanent crops, which we do a lot of investing in, there really isn't kind of a standardized single source. So we're dealing with a lot of individual handwritten tickets. And so I think that's one data set. You know, how much did the orchard produce? What was the price of the harvest? No yield monitors when you're, you know, picking navel oranges.”

FarmTogether is an online platform that sources farmland investment opportunities, performs due diligence, and manages the investments after acquisition.

Previous ReportIt's Not Blockchain That Matters - It's Data
Next ReportBringing Farm Chemistry Together