Tech at Climate LLC

Bayer Grants4Tech 2022: CarbonStock

How easy is it to quantify the amount of soil organic carbon (SOC) stored in a field? This is the essential question posed by the 2022 CarbonStock Grants4Tech challenge, an annual external Bayer program designed to foster innovation, this year focusing on...

Fostering Connection: The Inaugural RDE Summit

RDE is growing, and in-person connections are more valuable than ever; I feel truly fortunate to be a part of an organization that supports these connections at every opportunity....

Field Trials and Tribulations

After nearly a decade of driving our field trial program in Germany on corn and rye, a chance to stretch my knowledge into a new area has been a welcome one....

Showing Our Work: The Data Around Climate-Smart Farming

There are certain practices we know drive a more robust, sustainable environment and healthier soils. Conservation or strip tillage, crop rotation, the usage of cover crops – these practices are ones that we know enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) levels ...

An Internship in the Bag: Engineering a New FieldView Feature

This month marks the completion for summer internships around the United States. For me, as we speak, I’m gearing up for my final year at Monmouth University as I finish my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science...

Pride in My Work: Neil D’Souza

Inclusion@Climate: Sowing the Seeds of Belonging” is an occasional feature created by Climate’s Inclusion & Diversity team to highlight the diverse backgrounds of our employees as well as their achievements, passions, and personalities....

Rooted in the Land, Reaching for the Stars: Digital Farming Impact and Outreach

Our work is rooted in the land. We spend a majority of our time considering the impacts of digital farming technologies on farmers around the world. How farmers will use our technology, what sorts of value they can derive from our efforts, and how the fut...

Code Review with an Eye for Equity

A little over two years ago we initiated a project that aimed to address that central question. We sought to update the use of terminology in our coding infrastructure, to see if we could shift our language to one that relies less on outdated, offensive t...

The Wind at Our Backs: Changing Weather, Changing Weather Science

Weather forecasts play a critical role in many of the decisions we make, and doubly so for agriculture, where products of labor and investment are exposed to increasingly volatile and unpredictable patterns as our climate changes....

The Beginning of What’s Next: The 2022 Digital Farming Research Pipeline

Jeremy Williams, Head of Climate LLC and Digital Farming at Bayer Crop Science, sat down with Tom Eickhoff, Chief Science Officer for Climate LLC, for a short conversation about our own areas of research and where we’re delivering new value to farmers and...

An Important Partnership for Digital Farming’s Future

One of the central opportunities that bring me into work each day is the chance we have to improve lives and livelihoods around the world through data science and engineering solutions that help farmers lower risk, increase productivity, and enhance susta...

Getting Climate-Smarter: Our 10-Year Sustainability Trials

The environmental benefits of climate-smart practices like cover cropping, conservation tillage, and crop rotation are pretty well understood in how those practices are able to improve the soil micro- (and macro-) biome, prevent soil loss and erosion, and...

Into New Spaces: Eighteen Months of Change

If I had asked you during the 2019 year-end holiday season how you would handle 18 months of isolation due to a global pandemic, it would seem like an abstract, unimaginable idea. But here we are, still so many working from home, distancing ourselves from...

Putting the Pieces Together: A Day at Farm Progress Show

It’s been two years since I’ve been to a trade show, two years away from that ability to connect directly with farmers, getting real feedback on how our platform is doing, what they find valuable, and where we can do even better in the future....

Engineering an Impact

In many ways this internship has been the perfect evolution of my interests and the places in which I feel I can grow and contribute the most as I enter my career in data science....

The Past, Present and Future of Predicting Yield

Can machine learning and data science be used to predict the future for growers? Crop yield prediction is an extremely interesting technical challenge. It is not only one of the most financially impactful decisions a farmer makes each season, but also hel...

Where They Can Be Themselves: Monica Alandete-Saez

“Inclusion@Climate: Sowing the Seeds of Belonging” is a feature created by Climate LLC’s Inclusion & Diversity team to highlight the diverse backgrounds of our employees as well as their achievements, passions, and personalities. We hope you’l...

Hack Attack! Our First Remote Hackathon

It’s been a hard year away from the friendly faces in our offices at Climate LLC (Climate). One of the things we have so looked forward to at the beginning of 2021 is to bring our teams back together after the new year and really add some wind...

The Power of Public Data: Brazilian Open Data Portal

Day after day we generate exorbitant amounts of data from the many diverse activities that make up the Climate FieldView™ platform, scoping a number of possibilities for ways in which we can implement artificial intelligence solutions to help improve farm...

The Technology Behind Making a Difference

At Climate LLC, we seek to help all the world's farmers sustainably increase production with digital tools. Hear from several employees across Climate LLC in their words about our values, our mission, our culture, and what it's lik...

The Skin of the Earth Challenge: Crowdsourcing Data Solutions

As our platform expands around the world, we’re in a unique position in 2021 not only to drive availability of digital tools for all kinds of farmers, but to build out our data layers across the world and make the Climate FieldView™ platform even more rob...

Climate LLC Pipeline Capabilities: Foundation for the Future of Digital Ag

We’d like to share in advance a look into Climate LLC research pipeline in the words of Chief Science Officer Brian Lutz, aided and supported by the managers of our Climate Research Farms and Digital Ag & Sustainability Lead Dr. Pamela Bachman...

The Legal Answer and the Best Answer: Nikki Davis

“Inclusion@Climate: Sowing the Seeds of Belonging” is a feature created by Climate LLC’s Inclusion & Diversity team to highlight the diverse backgrounds of our employees as well as their achievements, passions, and personalities. We hope you’l...

A Bountiful Education: Crowning Our Fantasy Farming Winner

Climate LLC (Climate) started in Silicon Valley, but it’s not just our platform and the customers we serve who are spread around the world - so are our teams. Within our Science organization we operate several research farms in the Midwestern ...

From Unique to Ubiquitous: The Journey of a Farming Platform

As an adult, I’ve spent my career helping organizations embrace a similar mindset. The shift from traditional thinking to a product-focused mindset that allows a product to scale with the size of its customer base necessitates a careful approach. The oppo...

See That There’s A Me: Simon Carney

"Inclusion@Climate: Sowing the Seeds of Belonging” is a feature created by Climate LLC’s Inclusion & Diversity team to highlight the diverse backgrounds of our employees as well as their achievements, passions, and personalities. The third ent...

The Most Essential Service: Celebrating Farming’s Resilience

From Chief Science Officer Brian Lutz, an open letter to farmers on resilience, persistence, data, and decision making. This letter comes during the COVID-19 pandemic and at a time of uncertainty, when we’d rather be engaging with customers at the 2020 Fa...

Intern to Intern: Brianna Dawkins and Levi Kermes

Working anywhere in the time of COVID-19 has been challenging. Learning to work in an industry as part of an internship program is even more challenging. Our teams at Climate LLC and Bayer have not been in the office since March....

Your Full Self: Matt Garvert

“Inclusion@Climate: Sowing the Seeds of Belonging” is a feature created by Climate LLC’s Inclusion & Diversity team to highlight the diverse backgrounds of our employees as well as their achievements, passions, and personalities. We hope you’l...

Eine Welt der Daten: The Case for a World of Digital Farming

In my roles and years at Climate, I’ve seen North American farming across the Great Plains, Canadian fields of canola, and smallholder farms across India and the Philippines. I’m very lucky to have been able to travel (when travel was safe and advisable) ...

Soil: The Food for Our Food

Success in digital farming doesn’t have to be prefaced by generations spent on a farm, but it sure doesn’t hurt. I operate at the confluence of data science and traditional agriculture. As Chief Scientist, I couldn’t be more excited about the tools, analy...

Alternative Management in Practice: How Digital Ag Enables Conservation Decisions

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Head in the Clouds: Deep Learning-based Cloud and Shadow Detection via Remote Sensing

Satellite imagery powers a number of downstream applications at Climate; its value extends beyond image-based scouting maps. We use it to derive new data layers to map and monitor environmental or crop conditions at near real time globally. Those data lay...

Everyday Inclusion: Nisha Ramakrishnan

When I was 17, I came to the US as an intern for the US state department in recognition for early work I had done with farmers in rural India around technology, education, connectivity, and media. While the sponsoring organization took over and that proje...

Where’s the Remote? Success in the Age of Working Remotely

One of the things we pride ourselves on might be considered a relic of a bygone, non-tech era. Any of our North American farmer customers who need it, in the field or in their office, receive personalized customer support from a live person in our central...

Seeing Clear to the Horizon: Advancing Climate LLC’s Industry-Leading Digital Ag R&D Pipeline

For some of our farmer customers, including my brothers on our farm in Illinois, seeing clear to the horizon is something that’s literally possible, unless you’re in a Midwestern corn field past the end of July or so. For us at Climate, we look into the d...

HabiTally: A Habitat-Tallying App to Support Monarch Conservation

Biodiversity is a word that holds a lot of meaning for me, as I’ve focused my career on conserving and sustaining those systems that ultimately support us. I’d like to share with you an exciting new project, HabiTally, an iOS mobile application (app) with...

Product Placement: Evolution from Models to Digital Ag Advisor

The 2018 discovery science and modeling efforts shifted from a regional corn product placement model, a key component of the current Seed Advisor from FieldView product, to a field-level seed placement tool. This shift enabled modeling to better account f...

Podcast: The Age of Digital Agriculture - Seed Advisor

The way farmers use data is constantly evolving. Educated guesses and hand-written notes progressed to spreadsheets and digital maps. Today, advanced models with machine learning technology are ushering in a new chapter of predictive analytics in agricult...

Emerging AI technology at Climate: GANs and their applications and limitations in disease identification model

With hundreds of variations in publications, Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs, have been creating a big wave in the AI and machine learning research community since their invention by Ian Goodfellow in 2014. Yann Lecun, vice president and chief AI...

Production Model Execution via Capabilities

“If software ate the world, models will run it” is the conclusion of a recent influential article about how software and data are transforming the world today. The article nicely sums up how Climate is inventing digital agriculture, building on our road t...

A Statistician's Story to Enhance Sustainability

Statisticians at Climate LLC are developing unique, actionable insights for farmers to enhance their decisions and help them farm more sustainably. Vera Bulaevskaya and her team are entrenched in this work everyday, using statistical models to...

A Water Quality Partnership to Deliver Sustainability Benefits on the Farm

Advances in modern agriculture have enabled a dramatic increase in crop yields and consequently, more security in the supply of food, feed, fuel and fiber to support a growing and more affluent global population....

From Apple to Google to Climate: An Irish Engineer’s Story Localizing Software Around the World

There is no denying the exceptional growth of the Climate FieldView™ digital agriculture platform over the last couple of years. Adoption has grown to more than 100,000 users across the United States, Canada and Brazil....

Designing Products for a Unique User Base

Like many others, I have an overwhelming desire to do good in the world. I want to work for a company with a mission that will leave a positive lasting imprint. Sometimes that is easier said than done, as many businesses have conflicting ideals....

Connecting the Biophysics of Agricultural Systems with the Big Data Revolution

Modeling agricultural systems, such as crop production, from biological, physical and/or chemical principles can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s. The models used were “process models,” which are mathematical abstractions that explicitly describe a s...

Climate to the Rescue! Rebuilding the Lost HRRR Weather Model Archive

Shortly after the start of the year, University of Utah Professor John Horel, and PhD student Brian Blaylock, discovered that the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) object-storage system, known as Pando, had experienced a system failure....

Partnering with Universities to Advance the Oldest and Newest Professions: Agriculture and Technology

Last month we had the great pleasure of opening the Bayer Crop Science Innovation Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This partnership drives forward the confluence of agronomic and data science excellence by fostering innovat...

Disease ID: How We Scaled Our Deep Learning Model with Distributed Training

At Climate LLC, we are applying deep learning to solve problems across various technical and scientific domains. As my colleague Wei describes in his recent post Some Deep Learnings about Applying Deep Learning, one way we are using deep learn...

Hack Attack: Global Participation in our Annual Hackathon

Every January Climate LLC conducts a Hackathon competition where teams from across the company come together to work on new ideas for complex, interesting projects and to address existing problems. ...

Some Deep Learnings from Applying Deep Learning

To build a robust deep learning model, it can be much more than training or fine tuning some existing models (e.g. inception v3, resnet, LSTM, etc.) with your own dataset. These winning models are your best friend and can usually serve as base models....

On the Road to a Billion Acres of Data

What if we could improve sustainability, yields, and profitability via a deep understanding of comparative variability and productivity across agronomic variables and decisions?...

Cajun Country to FieldView - The Journey of a Geospatial Guru

When I started at Climate LLC more than two years ago, I never expected my passion for our mission and the innovation we are building to explode so quickly....