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aWhere, a weather and agriculture intelligence platform, has just raised a $2.45 million round of capital. The company, which provides hyper-local weather data for farmers and analyzes data around the agriculture value chain, sees enormous opportunity in improving access to information available for the farming industry.
“We provide smart content to the world’s 580 million farmers,” said John Corbett, CEO and co-founder. “We monitor the weather, so you can see where your risk is increasing. So you can make better decisions.”
While weather data may not at first seem like an important service, given the free and widespread forecasts available online, Corbett said for farmers highly accurate and local weather reports are critical.
“The only thing that really matters to a farmer is what is happening on their farm. It doesn’t matter what the average amount of rain is in the county,” said Corbett. “Most agriculture is rain fed so just knowing where it rains helps you understand what happens at harvest.”
The information is also valuable to farm product providers searching for better ways to sell their goods. Instead of spending time selling and marketing to farms who may have missed good weather, agricultural service providers can use the weather data to predict which farms are most in need of their products.
“A lot of the world has very little information. If you don’t have a way to monitor it how are you going to be able to know what people are going to need next growing season?” said Corbett.
Corbett said he especially sees a lot value in providing such information to farmers in sections of the world like Africa where farming information is lacking.
“Africa tends to deliver data two to three weeks slow. Where as we have up-to-date data,” said Corbett.
In fact, the data aWhere provides can help farmers understand the market supply of their crop so they could better set prices. If for instance, soybean crops in other regions have been suffering from a draught a farmer could raise their prices to match market conditions. Farmers in Africa often sell their crops below market prices.
This information will be especially valuable as global warming increases the variability of weather conditions. Good agricultural intelligence will help farmers use their resources efficiently to temper the effect of weather swings on their crops.
And as the world population continues to grow beyond 7 billion, there won’t be a shortage of demand for agricultural products anytime soon.
