Last week, CNH and Farmers Edge, a Canadian-based decision ag developer, announced an exclusive strategic partnership to expand data management and agronomic solutions for Case IH and New Holland dealers.

The agreement gives dealers access to the Farmers Edge FarmCommand platform — which connects with existing CNH portals of current, legacy or mixed machinery fleets with CAN bus functionality — to provide satellite imagery and crop growth insights. Customers can also select advanced options based on price points, with premium packages offering variable-rate prescriptions, sampling services and in-person agronomic support.

Scott Harris, Case IH vice president of North America, says the agreement marks another step in the company’s investment into precision farming solutions, combining the strengths of Farmers Edge with the preexisting capabilities of the Case IH AFS portal to help dealers expand revenue opportunities.

“It’s another strategic relationship with a digital solution that complements what we’re doing on the machine side relative to the AFS technology, and the data that provides producers to machine operation and their conditions and locations, etc. Then you combine that with agronomic data, if you will, that Farmers Edge supplies and put that together, you develop this ecosystem that gives a producer the opportunity to collect the data and then share it with whomever he needs.”

Farmers Edge Chief Product and Strategy Officer Ron Osborne says Case IH and New Holland dealers have already been rolling out the expanded platform, utilizing special programs set up through the agreement to help phase the services in. The ultimate goal, he adds, is giving dealers the tools to provide farmers with a complete digital infrastructure.

“From a technology standpoint, we’re bringing everything to bear and so are they into this partnership. Taking daily remote sensing or daily satellite imagery, we have thousands of weather stations across North America. You add in all of our ecosystem partners — and I think that’s something you’ll start to see, some continual announcements in perpetuity —is our growing ecosystem, feeding it information into this unified platform.”

The announcement marks one of several partnerships made by Farmers Edge in 2018. Agreements earlier in the year were made with Raven and PartnerRe to design and implement digital ag solutions, as well as with Titan Machinery for the distribution of services and full integration of field equipment data.