Farmobile unveils crowd-sourced crop progress and benchmarketing tool

Farmobile LLC, Agriculture's Independent Data Company , announces the launch of the Farmobile Index - a crop progress and benchmarking tool that leverages crowd-sourced data to deliver planting and harvest insights to farmer-customers. The Farmobile Index provides users with a daily view into aggregate, state-level crop results, ahead of USDA-NASS reported survey estimates. This allows farmer-customers to glean crop progress insights which the rest of the marketplace may not realize for up to a week.

 

The Index provides farmers with state-level, aggregated totals of planted and harvested acres (plus yield) while contributing their anonymized, ground-truthed data to enrich the accuracy of the data set. Users can create customized views by selecting state(s) and date ranges, and compare what is happening in-field to USDA/NASS reported estimates.

 

"We created the Farmobile Index exclusively for our farmer-users to bridge the gap in data reporting that currently exists in ag, and ultimately help reduce market volatility," said Jason Tatge, CEO of Farmobile. "It is designed to give them a daily straight-from-the-machine, view of planting and harvest progress as it happens. For too long, farmers have been at the mercy of commodity markets - the Farmobile Index is meant to put more power back in the farmers' hands, so they can make strategic decisions about how they market their crop."

The Index is updated daily with machine-generated data collected by the Farmobile PUC device. This ensures that farmer-customers get the most timely results.

 

As always, the privacy and security of farmers is paramount to Farmobile. Only data totals, aggregated at the state-level, are used for Farmobile Index insights. No identifiable farm data or individual Electronic Field Records is shared. Users' control over their data is strictly protected by Farmobile's data privacy and permissioning protocols. The Farmobile Index was created to benefit subscribers by providing "first-to-know" insights. Results are not intended for public use.

 

"Farmobile was founded on the belief that farmers own their data outright and should have full control over how it is used and who is viewing it - our Farmobile Index is in line with that vision," said Tatge. "Only Farmobile customers, who agree to the Equipment Lease and Data Upload Agreement, are able to access the data, and they can call us to opt-out their data from the Index. We're thrilled by the initial response and feedback we've gotten from customers who are using the Index - they've never had access to data like this before, and they're excited to apply it to the benefit of their operations."