12 million soil polygons with 365 days of WDT's SkyWise weather data and 87 hybrid seed types are what’s needed to know where, what, and when to plant a specific seed of corn. A daunting amount of data that was once impossible to process, requiring 300 billion spatial and temporal calculations, can now be performed in minutes.

Beck’s Hybrid Seeds out of Atlanta, Indiana has long understood that their 87 varieties of corn hybrids require 3 things to increase yields and dollars: 1.) Specific soil type, 2.) a narrow window of time, and 3.) the right amount of heat and moisture. They need to know exactly when to advise planting, exactly what type of seed should be used, and where it should be planted for their customers to maintain competitve advantage. Beck’s Field Advisers use this information when making recommendations to help customers increase ROI on their seed purchases.

Yet, when you mention weather to someone in agriculture, the typical response is:

“ I have a weather app on my phone. It says expect partly cloudy skies with a high of 78 and a low of 50. Rain chances are at 40% with 0.2 inches possible overnight. Extended forecast shows a cooler fall for central Indiana with the first frost possible in mid October.”

Weather forecasts like the one above fall short of accuracy because they aren’t using data, they’re using intuition. The new reality in agriculture is that these advanced analytics are available from WDT and together we can solve the problem of an ever-increasing global food supply of over 75% by 2050.

What Becks, ESRI, and WDT realize is that we aren’t going to increase ROI and production by a seed company building a weather model or a weather company building a yield model. We’re going to solve this by combining "big weather datasets" with "big agriculture datasets" and letting agronomic data scientists create the prescriptive actions.

It’s not only the amount but rather the quality of analytics that will yield the most ROI. This is why WDT has launched SkyWise Ag API, the industry's best rainfall estimation product for the globe with an archive stretching back to the early 2000s. Contact WDT today to learn more and start utilizing our weather datasets for your agronomic models.