As ag technology hardware and service providers continue to align, one of the latest collaborations was announced last week with Winnipeg-based Farmers Edge announcing a partnership with Raven Industries, based in Sioux Falls, S.D.

The agreement will expand Farmers Edge digital agronomy and risk management solutions, specifically leveraging the use of streaming data transfer between the company’s CanPlugs and Raven Slingshot and field computers.

Farmers Edge Chief Strategy Officer Ron Osborne, says the partnership will combines data sets with analytics, enabling farmers to make accurate management decisions from a single point. For dealers, he says the collaboration will create new aftermarket opportunities in digital agriculture.

“The relationship here between Raven and Farmers Edge also creates real value for the dealer to keep their people and have a reason to go back out on that farm, sit at the kitchen table, explain the partnership and explain some of these new capabilities in the field and in the back office. But in doing that, it financially incentivizes and rewards the dealers for being what they already are, which is a strong consultant to that farm. Because we’re marrying up the per-acre business model that Farmers Edge has and these long-term contracts, marrying that with the dealerships who traditionally haven’t access to that type of business model, has created a lot of excitement within the dealerships.”

The announcement coincides with Farmers Edge releasing its R&D Roadmap for 2018, which focuses on real-time notifications, multi-layered crop imagery, and the collection of field-centric data to improve the accuracy of growth stage prediction models.