Australian agribusiness giant and input supplier Ruralco announced it has made a strategic equity investment in cloud-based precision ag startup DataFarming.

Founded only last year by husband and wife, Time and Peta Neale, DataFarming is a web-based platform that employs satellite imagery and cloud-based systems to provide agronomists and agricultural producers greater insight into their crop and pasture production.

The startup focuses on five pillars of productivity: Crop and pasture growth, yields, waterlogging, soil variation, and weather impacts. Offering their services on a tiered basis, the most basic version provides a client with a Normalized Difference Vegetation Image (NDVI) of a property at no cost, and can then apply for a high definition NDVI that supplies actionable insights including variable rate fertilizer prescriptions, topography analysis, drainage recommendations, and yield mapping for a fee.

This tiered business model was formed with the goal of keeping costs to a minimum and to increase farmer adoption.

“We have a completely different model [compared] to other companies,” said Tim Neale, co-founder of DataFarming and a 20 year veteran in the agtech space. “My whole aim is to increase adoption, to get it from boutique to mainstream, to increase adoption of precision agriculture.”

The business model appears to be successful when considering the rapid growth the company has seen in its short existence.

“We’re only 12 months old but we already have over 6000 farms and 40,000 paddocks in our system, covering approximately 3.6 million hectares of processed data,” said Neale.

“Agronomists have commented how much time is saved on crop checking and while helping them make big decisions and farmers just love the ability to check their crop growth on a regular basis.”

-Lynda Kiernan