Jun 10, 2021

A Bountiful Harvest: Farm Market iD Drives Better Agribusiness Decision-Making with Redpoint

Each year the US agriculture market contributes nearly $1 trillion in economic value to the economy. Even as the industry is being asked to produce more food, it is also faced with less available farmland, increasingly volatile weather, government regulations, trade restrictions and modulating commodity prices.

These challenges have given rise to data-driven farm and agribusiness decision making including precision agriculture, a site-specific crop management approach that employs historical, observational and real-time data to optimize field yields, productivity and profitability. Farm Market iD, which is a brand of DTN, provides innovative data and analytics specializing in detailed, accurate, fact-based information and services for the US agriculture market.

Farm Market iD manages trillions of data points covering farms and farmers at the field level, including variables such as soils, crop and real-time satellite imagery and weather conditions. Its proprietary, fact-based database aggregates government records and other proprietary data sources, covering 900 million acres of farmland and nearly 1.5 billion head of livestock.

Processing this data at tremendous speed, Farm Market iD creates strategic go-to-market insights for its agribusiness customers, including crop protection, nutrient, seed, farm equipment, financial services and direct marketing companies. The company also offers trend analysis and enhanced marketing capabilities used for everything from research and development to sales strategies.

Going Deep with Data: No Soil Left Unturned

To deliver the kind of detailed intelligence its agribusiness customers depend on, Farm Market iD compiles data going back more than 20 years covering more than 30 million farm fields, comprising over 900 million acres. To maximize productivity and profitability, large amounts of disparate data are used to analyze farms, fields, soil and crops at ¼ acre increments for over 900 million acres. In many cases, applying data science on small areas – which may require different types of seed, irrigation, nutrients, etc. – often doubles a farm’s output. Other data sources include real estate data, behavioral-based persona data, Gross Farm Income and crop rotation history.

To integrate and process this data, Farm Market iD needed a platform that had the integration, automation, and processing power to manage big data at scale. Farm Market iD chose Redpoint Data Management as its data platform, in part because during a proof of concept it processed address hygiene roughly 15 to 20 times faster than a competitor’s 2.5 million records per hour.

Because of the Redpoint solution’s ability to process structured and unstructured data, Farm Market iD can integrate all types of data to deliver exceptional levels of information and insight to customers, such as determining crop identity based on infrared signatures from satellites.

With Redpoint, Farm Market iD produces a greater depth of information for its agribusiness customers, such as the integration of crop data, field-level geospatial insights, real estate data, statistically modeled insights, consumer demographics, and more.

With the ability of Redpoint Data Management to process structured and unstructured data, Farm Marked ID can “layer” all types of information on top of its databases to deliver an exceptional, unprecedented level of information and insight to customers. An imagery layer, for instance, determines crop identity and density based on an infrared signature from satellites. Climate information, elevation data, hailstorm and tornado tracking information are also collected.

The solution also has deep capabilities for ETL, geospatial coding, persistent key management, golden record creation, and lights out automation at unparalleled processing speed and scalability.

“A great value in Redpoint is time savings. The Redpoint solution allows me to have everything under one application umbrella. We never have to jump from one technology to another,” says Farm Market iD CEO Steve Rao.

Reaping New Productivity

The use of Redpoint, Rao says, has freed his team from data flow mechanics, leaving more time for strategy, creative ideation and product development. And because of its ease of use, scalability and performance, it has become a product development tool for the company, allowing it to experiment with new ideas based on client needs, and developing and delivering new products in record time.

For example, a new alert system notifies clients – retailers, manufacturers, bankers, etc. – when a farm field changes hands, experiences a severe weather alert, or has experienced a vegetative anomaly, a system made possible by Redpoint’s processing data collected from nearly 900 million acres and 4 million contacts against a variety of timely events.

Redpoint’s integrated capabilities, processing speeds and lights-out operations are helping Farm Market iD to use data to change the agriculture industry for the better.