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Monsanto is worried about Climate Change, & their Bottom Line
Monsanto Is Using Big Data to Take Over the World
The GMO giant wants to help you beat climate change…with your phone.
—By Tim McDonnell
| Wed Nov. 19, 2014 6:00 AM EST
...Whatever your feelings about Monsanto, it's hard to argue that the company isn't paying attention to climate change. When I met Fraley in New York in September, he explained that since he joined the company in 1981, Monsanto scientists have observed corn production belts migrate northward by about 200 miles. That means traditional strongholds like Kansas are becoming less productive, while new markets for Monsanto products are opening in places like North Dakota and southern Canada. But for Fraley, who has spent his career digging through the minutiae of microscopic nucleotides, the most interesting trends are emerging on a much smaller scale.
"Just a couple degrees difference changes when insects will hatch, or when diseases will break out," he says. "So that puts a real premium on modeling microclimatic conditions, so you can become predictive on not only which field, but which part of a field should someone be looking at."
Last year, Monsanto made a major investment in big data analytics when it paid $930 million to acquire Climate Corporation, a San Francisco tech firm whose original business was selling crop insurance to farmers with rates set by some of the most detailed weather data available anywhere. These days, Climate Corp.'s flagship product is a smartphone app called Climate Basic. The screenshot to the left—from my iPhone, taken back in early October—shows my family's corn and soy farm in Iowa. You can see each of five individual fields highlighted. There are 30 million agricultural fields in America, and the app has all of them, mapped with soil and climate data to a 10-meter-by-10-meter resolution.
The app knows our fields' real-time temperature, weather, and soil moisture, and what we can expect on those metrics for the coming week. The green tractor tells me Saturday is the best day to work the fields. If I were to input data about what kinds of seeds I planted and when, it could tell me when to harvest them and how much yield to expect....
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/11/monsanto-big-data-gmo-climate-change
The GMO giant wants to help you beat climate change…with your phone.
—By Tim McDonnell
| Wed Nov. 19, 2014 6:00 AM EST
...Whatever your feelings about Monsanto, it's hard to argue that the company isn't paying attention to climate change. When I met Fraley in New York in September, he explained that since he joined the company in 1981, Monsanto scientists have observed corn production belts migrate northward by about 200 miles. That means traditional strongholds like Kansas are becoming less productive, while new markets for Monsanto products are opening in places like North Dakota and southern Canada. But for Fraley, who has spent his career digging through the minutiae of microscopic nucleotides, the most interesting trends are emerging on a much smaller scale.
"Just a couple degrees difference changes when insects will hatch, or when diseases will break out," he says. "So that puts a real premium on modeling microclimatic conditions, so you can become predictive on not only which field, but which part of a field should someone be looking at."
Last year, Monsanto made a major investment in big data analytics when it paid $930 million to acquire Climate Corporation, a San Francisco tech firm whose original business was selling crop insurance to farmers with rates set by some of the most detailed weather data available anywhere. These days, Climate Corp.'s flagship product is a smartphone app called Climate Basic. The screenshot to the left—from my iPhone, taken back in early October—shows my family's corn and soy farm in Iowa. You can see each of five individual fields highlighted. There are 30 million agricultural fields in America, and the app has all of them, mapped with soil and climate data to a 10-meter-by-10-meter resolution.
The app knows our fields' real-time temperature, weather, and soil moisture, and what we can expect on those metrics for the coming week. The green tractor tells me Saturday is the best day to work the fields. If I were to input data about what kinds of seeds I planted and when, it could tell me when to harvest them and how much yield to expect....
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/11/monsanto-big-data-gmo-climate-change
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