Agriculture is constantly evolving, and technology such as New Holland’s PLM Connect is enabling producers to collect vast amounts of data that holds a great amount of power that could significantly increase yield productions and farm efficiencies.

“New Holland is pleased to introduce these new advancements to our PLM Connect technology,” said Mark Hooper, Senior Director of Marketing for New Holland in North America. “With this technology, producers are able to gain valuable insights into their operation to help them increase yields, optimize input usage, all while becoming more efficient thanks to the new cloud-based data transfer and unsurpassed connectivity.”

PLM Connect now operates with a two-way wireless data transfer, enabling cloud-based technology to be used for easy and secure transfer of data to and from machines in the field. There are many answers embedded within farm data that could further help producers improve yields and optimize the usage of their inputs, and cloud-based data transfer gives producers another way to increase efficiencies within their operation.

“In the past, a constraint of using PLM technology has been the cumbersome process of transporting the data from the field back to the farm or crop consultant and back to the field using USB drives,” said Dan Valen, New Holland’s Cash Crop Segment Marketing Manager. “The new cloud-based transfer system will allow producers to access data more efficiently and transform it in a way that can provide insights for optimizing input usages and improving yield productions.”

With PLM Connect’s wireless file transfer feature, producers no longer need to use USB drives for transferring data. They are now able to easily and securely transmit data such as guidance lines, boundaries, variable rate prescriptions, as-applied data, yield and moisture data, etc. through the cloud back to their farm office, or to their crop consultant or trusted advisor. The data can then be transformed into valuable insights for making informed planting and fertilizing decisions, or using variable rate application prescriptions.

Helping producers bring value to their data provides opportunity to gain continuous year over year improvements and yield increases. Every year there is new opportunity to learn from data and continuously improve fact-based decisions that enhance performance and profitability. PLM Connect now enables producers to realize these improvements by not only providing real time machine information for optimizing equipment utilization and productivity, but now the wireless transfer of data to and from their machines, so that field data can easily be transformed into answers for increasing yields and profitability.

Ownership of the Data

With PLM Connect, the producer owns the agronomic data generated from their farm and maintains the right to control who has access to it. Neither New Holland, nor its dealers, will have access to agronomic data.  If you decide to grant a third party service provider access to your data, PLM Connect has built in administrative levels that enable you to control the level of access granted to that third party provider. New Holland understands the importance of data and its potential to transform agriculture, but it is imperative that the producer maintains control and ownership of data.

New Holland’s parent company is a founding member of the Open Ag Data Alliance, or OADA, a not-for-profit community that is working to create a set of open API’s for securely using data with the cloud, and ensuring that producers retain control over their data. The OADA is actively working to ensure the security of farm data, privacy and interoperability between different systems. New Holland is a proud member and supporter of the OADA.

PLM Connect is compatible with two of the largest cellular networks in North America: GSM and CDMA. And not only is PLM compatible with both networks, it seamlessly searches between the networks and connects to the strongest cellular network connection available. If connection is lost, it will automatically undertake a new network search and reconnect to the best available network. These automatic connection features across two cellular networks allow operators to secure a constant and reliable connection throughout their acreage.