Blazing a trail
The Climate Corporation in San Francisco—acquired not long ago by Monsanto—is one example of a company blazing a trail with machine learning. It helps to protect and improve farming operations with precision agriculture sensors and systems, data analytics software, insurance products and risk management services. It doesn’t simply provide crop insurance, but also advisory services that help farmers make optimal decisions.
Climate Corp. uses machine learning to dig through more than 50 terabytes of live data about weather, soil conditions, and many other sources to predict crop performance. Its agrochemical parent can now not only recommend the most profitable crops to plant, but also what types of seed to buy, when to plant, how to tend the crops, when to harvest, what yields to expect, and even what revenue farmers can expect at the end of the growing season.
Today, farmers are able to buy field-specific weatherrelated crop insurance that guarantees financial outcomes and hedges against the risk presented by increasingly variable and extreme weather events. Climate Corp. does its job so well it is essentially alone its market—a compelling example of how digital technology can help insurers build barriers to entry that rivals may find difficult to surmount