Climate Corp. Nixes Tillable Agreement: Will It Cast a Long Shadow on Trust in Data Sharing?

By CropLife

I’ve spent the last couple of months through editorials, stories, and even on camera in my weekly video noting the amount of productive collaboration that agriculture has experienced over the past year, writes Paul Schrimpf at CropLife. I firmly believe that the only way farmers will be able to extract a measure of value from the field data they generate is if it’s movable and compatible with multiple systems. Otherwise, it’s an exercise in futility.

Flash forward to last week, and the events that led Climate Corp. to cut ties with digital farmland management startup Tillable in little more than 24 hours. Wow, what an absolute mess.

I, like many, followed the blow-by-blow events unfold on the popular old-school web forum AgTalk and, later on, in the Twitterverse from Thursday, February 13 through Friday the 14th and into the weekend.

I’ve been covering this industry for 20 years, and I understand very clear the undercurrents of mistrust and frustration of suppliers on the farmer side, and the challenge of creating and advancing ideas on the manufacturer side. Everyone walks a tightrope. But the volume of outrage and reaction to this caught me a bit by surprise, at least at first.