The Climate Corporation, a Monsanto subsidiary, has bought HydroBio, an agriculture software company based in Denver. The HydroBio team will join The Climate Corporation in delivering digital to growers worldwide.
“HydroBio has unique irrigation-focused data analytics capabilities, and as global water use for crop production increases, efficient irrigation is becoming even more important to the future of sustainable agriculture,” Mike Stern, CEO of The Climate Corporation, said in a news release. “HydroBio has built a successful business, and their tools will complement our Climate FieldView digital agriculture platform offerings in the future.”
HydroBio uses a combination of satellite imagery, soil data and hyper-local weather data to deliver irrigation insights for growers to help improve crop water-use efficiency and maximize yields, officials for the companies said in a news release. Its data-driven irrigation management platform turns satellite images into actionable information, builds custom irrigation prescriptions for optimized water application, and provides crop health monitoring throughout the growing season for enhanced productivity, company officials said in a news release.
“We at HydroBio are very excited to join The Climate Corporation to bring our scalable irrigation management offering to more farmers in the future,” said Barrett Mooney, co-founder and CEO at HydroBio, in a news release. “We’re looking forward to collaborating with the great team at Climate to enhance the Climate FieldView platform and introduce new, digital tools that transform how technology is used on the farm.”
Prior to this acquisition, Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV), the venture capital arm of Monsanto Company, saw promise in the developing company and invested in HydroBio, incorporating it into the MGV portfolio that includes a wide range of independent companies active in key areas of agricultural productivity.
This year, Monsanto Europe launched AquaTek, a commercial irrigation management tool for corn that is powered by HydroBio’s irrigation management platform. Officially launched in 2015, the Climate FieldView platform is on more than 100 million acres across the U.S., Canada and Brazil, with more than 100,000 U.S. growers using Climate’s digital tools.
Backed by a data science engine and a field research network, Climate FieldView delivers customized insights that help growers make data-driven decisions with confidence to maximize yield potential, improve efficiency and manage risk, the company officials says. In November 2016, the company acquired VitalFields, a European farm management software company based in Tallinn, Estonia, marking the company’s first step into the European market. The company plans to bring Climate FieldView to Europe in the coming year, with additional launch plans for Australia, Argentina and South Africa over the next few years.
Source: Successful Farming