Main Street Data is data science company focused on the broad agriculture ecosystem. It and its predecessors have been addressing the needs of growers since 2000 ranging from combine sharing solutions to agronomic, financial underwriting, crop insurance, and property valuation solutions. MSD has spent over $100M collecting data and developing solutions and products for some of the most challenging problems in agriculture. See video on CloudburstAg web site for further info.

Main Street Data has systematically collected billions of elements of publicly available weather, land, soils, yield, and other, proprietary,  data over the last 20 plus years including 1.3B samples of proprietary corn, soybean and wheat yield over 26 states, 30B data elements of land, soil and 10 T weather elements identifying the natural, uncontrollable data elements associated with each sample of yield. The yield samples were collected in an unprecedentedly careful fashion including quality assurance both before and following collection, calibrating the combines, and monitoring over the air for calibration changes. No other large data set approaches MSD’s in quality.

The effects of soil and other naturally occurring element (23 for each yield sample) and weather have been measured over the last 20 plus years to determine their impact on yield at the resolution of 1560 square feet. The impacts of farming practices are therefore isolated permitting benchmarking of growers based on comparable growing conditions.  Following normalization, the differences in actual production are a factor of grower performance. For forecasting purposes MSD includes a technology factor that has tracked the effects on production of all technology changes and farming practices over the last 20 plus years.

MSD accuracy is unparalleled. Agriculture is a very challenging area for data science. Without very expensive quality assurance practices, the error ranges for data are significantly larger than in most contexts. While public data is plentiful, much of it is generally of highly questionable accuracy. Yield data relies on appropriate maintenance of equipment, calibration, careful adherence to business process in interactions with supply chain, granular weather, and forecasting. The best way to characterize accuracy is, with the most careful management, the outcome is directional. With less that the most careful management, the outcome is unknowable. If machinery is not maintained. If machines are not calibrated and business processes not followed and documented no reliance on the data can be justified. Users of data powered tools should inquire about adherence to the forgoing standards before relying. MSD has pursued the most rigorous data science process in the industry.

1. To determine benchmark performance compared to others farming under comparable conditions.
2. To determine whether performance is improving or deteriorating when normalized for changes in weather. Weather, from time to time accounts for more than 100% of improvement from year to year.
3. To determine whether my grain marketing is equal to, worse than or better than others in my county.
4. To understand when I should consider selling my crop based on my sold position, forecast for the area and MSD’s proprietary Market Signals.
5. To understand my forecast production based on crop production to date and forecast conditions for the remainder of the growing season.
6. To anticipate planting conditions and timing based on a soil moisture forecast of up to 6 months.
7. To understand what seed/other products perform best under comparable conditions.

A. Market Signals which, based on proprietary fair value determinations and production forecasts, provide selling signals to optimize price.

B. Growing Scores – providing field level benchmarks based on normalized growing conditions

C. Many more

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With the advent of the internet and centralized data storage, data began to be increasingly stored and retrieved from centralize data center locations. The collective decentralized storage, AWS and Google being two principal participants, became referenced as the Cloud.

You should consider all tools to be just that – tools that, together will other available information, help you make better decisions. There are no “silver bullets” – exact measurements that tell you what to do. Quest for absolute “Precision” can be harmful. When a doctor takes your pulse and tells you it is 77 BPS, would it make a difference if he found it to be 80 BPS of 72 BPS or 40 or 120? It is the range that is important. How about blood pressure 115/70 versus 120/80 or 160/ 100. MSD seeks to provide informative tools that represent meaningful precision and that aid in decision making and not prescriptive directions than remove you and your information base and judgment from the decision-making process. I am a patient at Mayo, consistently ranked as the best hospital in the world with many of the best doctors.  I do my own research and I ask lots of questions of those doctors. I probe their opinions. I seek second opinions. My health is too important to assign it to the unchallenged opinion of a fallible human being. So too is your farm. We encourage you to become a learning machine. Don’t permit anyone to know more about your business than you.