After piloting a program in Hawaii with Understory, Monsanto is now partnering with the company for on-the-ground insight into Argentina’s weather.
“Understory provides the only technology necessary to make hyper-local weather valuable for operations management in agricultural areas where local weather information is not accurate,” says Giovanni Piccinni, Monsanto global supply chain field optimization lead. “With localized accurate data, growers can streamline operational challenges and boost economic outcomes.
“We anticipate this being an important and valuable partnership.”
Understory reports that its weather network is different from other weather hardware. In a news release, the company shares its “network provides customers with a full-stack, rugged, maintenance-free, precision weather solution where Understory sites, installs and operates the network while providing a real-time data platform and API.”
Its weather network can also be integrated with any third-party sensors available on the market.
With the ability for each station to provide 50,000 measurements a second, Argentinian growers in the corn growing regions of Córdoba and Buenos Aires will now have precise hail, rainfall, temperature, humidity, evapotranspiration and growing degree units. This data will help to inform Monsanto’s decisions around irrigation, harvest dates and times and seed production.
“Argentina is an agricultural giant that produces 22 percent of the world’s soybeans, yet many growers there, and around the world still lack data insights due to the remote harsh farming conditions,” says Alex Kubicek, Understory CEO. “Our collaboration with Monsanto promises to deliver daily operational insights to farmers around the world to yield better, healthier crops, and it can be deployed anywhere without the need for oversite or management.”
