The Climate Corporation Introduces Climate Basic™ and Climate Pro™ for 2014

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Climate Corporation today announced the availability of Climate Basic™ and Climate Pro™ for the 2014 Crop Year.

Climate Basic™ is a mobile service that optimizes a farmer's daily decision making by providing up-to-the-minute, field-level current and future weather, soil, and crop growth stage information. Climate Basic™ is more powerful than services costing hundreds of dollars per year and is available at climate.com to farmers nationwide at no cost.

Climate Pro™ is a revolutionary web and mobile service that increases a farmer's profitability through customized field recommendations that maximize yield and minimize costs. Climate Pro™ provides recommendations before and during the growing season that dynamically adjust to changing weather-related and other field conditions.  Key recommendations offered by Climate Pro™ include what relative maturity and planting date will optimize yield, where, when, and how much to sidedress nitrogen, what integrated pest management mitigates yield loss, where variable rate application will be beneficial, and what harvest date optimizes dry down costs, grain moisture and yield.  Farmers will also have access to up-to-the-minute, field-specific weather, forecasts, and crop conditions as well as farm-level yield projections. Climate Pro™ for 2014 provides corn farmers with an average increase in profits of over $100 per acre for only $15 per acre and soybean farmers with an average increase in profits of over $50 acre for only $7.50 per acre.

"We're at a very important point in agriculture – the ability to better understand and interpret environmental and agricultural data will help farmers optimize yield through smarter seed genetics, planting rates, and a myriad of measurable crop production decisions.  Today, farmers have access to so much data, but they tell us they don't know how to drive actionable value from it," says David Friedberg, CEO of The Climate Corporation. "Over the past five years, our scientists and engineers have developed the Climate Technology Platform™ to transform complex information into actionable insight and real-time farm management recommendations to help farmers increase their profitability."

The Climate Technology Platform^TM is the same proprietary technology that powers The Climate Corporation's risk management products, consisting of hyper-local weather monitoring, high resolution weather simulations, and unique agronomic models.  

• Hyper-local weather monitoring across the country provides assessments of field and subfield-level environmental conditions by incorporating dozens of public and private environmental observation networks and remote sensing systems, coupled with various proprietary and published models.
• High-resolution weather simulations incorporate current hyper-local environmental observations, short-range weather forecasts, climate signals, long-range trends, and other proprietary research models to produce a dynamic, full-season, probabilistic forecast for each field.
• Agronomic models represent the intersection of agronomy and data science, estimating agricultural production outcomes based on various static and dynamic inputs, including farming practices, field characteristics, weather simulations, and other key variables.  

Rob Sladek and his family run a large corn and soybean operation across five counties in eastern Iowa, and Rob has become an avid user of climate.com, the precursor to Climate Basic™, during the 2013 growing season.

"Keeping track of what is going on in every field is a challenge," says Sladek. "With different planting dates, seed varieties and variable weather, we experience a wide variety of field conditions each day.  Our climate.com service has changed how we run our operation by giving us up-to-the-minute weather and crop conditions for each field accessible at the click of a button. As a result, we're able to be more efficient in deploying resources throughout the growing season.  And we have come to believe in the advanced features of the service like Harvest Advisor to accurately predict yields and crop moisture levels.  I'm eager to use the new tools for the 2014 crop year."

Climate Basic™ and Climate Pro™ both have uniquely powerful features and benefits:

Climate Basic™ Features

• Hyper-local field-level weather and forecasts: comprehensive historical, current, and probabilistic short and long range weather forecasts, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, radar imagery, and proprietary field workability
• Tracker: current and projected crop growth stages and soil moisture
• Alerts: extreme weather, daily precipitation and temperature summaries, hail alerts and crop updates
• Scouting & Notes:  mobile tools for scouting and other in-field activities.  Easy ability to share information across different users.  Seamlessly includes key weather and field conditions.

Climate Basic™ Benefits                                                            

• Environmental and agronomic data made accessible and simple: field-level weather, workability and growth stage tracking in a single platform helps streamline and improve decision making
• Tracking and scouting tools improved: integrated logging of scouting activities and weather observations helps farmers make timely decisions that can improve yields
• Smarter production decisions: current field-level conditions and forecasts help farmers better plan planting, tillage, spraying and harvest to save valuable time
• Field and Weather Alerts:  alerts delivered via text, email and mobile app allow farmers to be more responsive to rapidly changing field conditions, saving time and preventing lost yield

Climate Pro™ Features

• All Climate Basic™ features listed above
• Planting Advisor: select the optimal planting date and relative maturity for each field based on current conditions and projected seasonal weather
• Nitrogen Advisor: manage nitrogen (N) more effectively by tracking subfield level crop available N and receiving alerts about potential stress due to lack of N before yield is impacted
• Pest & Disease Advisor: continuous monitoring of pest and disease risk to take the guesswork out of decisions about preventative and curative pest management
• Variable Rate Advisor: get insight into the subfield variability of each field to better plan variable rate practices
• Harvest Advisor: plan field-by-field harvest based on maturity and grain moisture. Continuously evaluate the tradeoffs between increased drying costs and yield loss.
• Farm Level Revenue Dashboard: view operation-level yield and revenue outcomes and make informed marketing decisions

Climate Pro™ Benefits

• Increase profit per acre by $100 for corn and $50 for soybeans on average: by increasing yield, decreasing cost and saving time, Climate Pro™ increases each acre's bottom line
• Anticipate problems before they impact yield: identify crop stress from lack of nitrogen, pests, and other causes and evaluate possible responses before stress reduces yields
• Optimize responsiveness to events as they happen: get the information and decision tools to make adjustments that maximize acre profitability for each challenge Mother Nature brings
• Maximize efficiency of Farmer's time and budget: save time gathering data, driving to fields, and scouting crops to spend more time farming

More information detailing the value creation for Climate Pro^TM can be found in White Papers available on our website at www.climate.com

Climate Basic™ is available starting today at no cost. Climate Pro™ is available for the 2014 Crop Year for $15 per acre for over $100 of increased profit on average for corn and $7.50 per acre for over $50 of increased profit on average for soybeans. Climate Basic™ and Climate Pro™ are available through The Climate Corporation's partners. Farmers can get a free demo and find a local provider through www.climate.com.

About The Climate Corporation

The Climate Corporation aims to help farmers around the world protect and improve their farming operations with uniquely powerful software and insurance products. The company's proprietary Climate Technology Platform™ combines hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver Climate Basic™ and Climate Pro™, mobile SaaS solutions that helps farmers improve profitability by making better informed operating and financing decisions, and Total Weather Insurance, an insurance offering that pays farmers automatically for bad weather that may impact their profits. The company is also an authorized provider of the U.S. Federal crop insurance program, enabling authorized independent crop insurance agents to provide farmers with the industry's most powerful full-stack risk management solution. In the face of increasingly volatile weather, the global $3 trillion agriculture industry depends on the company's unique technologies to help stabilize and improve profits and, ultimately, help feed the world. For more information, please visit http://www.climate.com or follow the company on Twitter @climatecorp

SOURCE The Climate Corporation