The Secret Weapon of Landus: Military Grade AI Tech Connects Farm Data Dots

DES MOINES, Iowa (July 24, 2024) — Farmers and agronomists today are virtually drowning in data, but one Midwest cooperative has a new secret weapon up its sleeve.

Landus (Des Moines, Iowa) has seemingly struck digital farm data gold and, as with all things Landus of late, farmers themselves look to be the big winners here.

Landus and American invention company Tesseract Ventures have joined forces to bring military-grade, predictive data analysis straight from the high-tech battlefield of today to a new digital decision support platform for farmers and Landus agronomists. The cooperative is calling its new software offering Synthesis.

What is Synthesis?

Synthesis automates the collection and combination of data across an incredibly wide swath of sources – everything from satellites and drones to on-farm sensors, weather stations, and even disparate farm machinery brands.

The Synthesis system leverages algorithms originally designed for advanced military intelligence applications to literally synthesize all the relevant available data for a select field or operation into three different modules (Plan, Perform, and Prove) that farmers and their agronomists can use to make digital twins, or virtual simulations, of their fields.

By using these digital twins of their real-life fields, the farm management process goes from an inexact, multiple-variable guessing game to a laser-sharp predictive level. There is no more guessing, for example, what would happen to yield and the farmer’s bottom line if Farmer Joe were to put on this generic fungicide at V5. The platform is able to wormhole its way into the future, visualizing in real-time the impact of various management decisions for the farmer before any action is taken.

“It’s a radical way to reimagine information exchange and how to action it,” says John Boucard, Tesseract CEO. “We are creating and deploying 21st century human machine interfaces that can navigate the past, present, and future – today, we now can visualize the past and the present with real-time and edge data, and then envision future events and their impact before they happen.”

In developing and releasing Synthesis to the greater farm universe, Landus and Tesseract have essentially unlocked one of ag tech’s previously unsolvable quandaries: how to take all these different data layers and previously incompatible file formats, and combine them in a single platform where the farmer can have a complete 360-degree view of everything that is happening as well as everything that could happen in the field?

“Agriculture has great data,” says Matt Carstens, CEO of Landus. “But we have never been able to get it into one spot and then let the farmer analyze the data in real-time to create a digital twin that can visualize virtually any scenario. Now they can go out on the farm and be confident.”

Data visualization details

Having viewed a pilot version of Synthesis during our visit to Landus’ Innovation Connector, the platform’s data visualization capability leaps through the screen and grabs your attention. Many digital platforms lay out data in a two-dimensional, color-coded view across a field, but Synthesis has a unique three-dimensional approach to displaying different areas of the field.

Bear with me, as it’s tough to describe it here in words, but it’s a tiered, graphical representation of your real-time and future yield potential: vertically climbing spikes in green are healthy, high-performing areas of the field, while lower-lying, red colored bars show areas in the field with lower yield potential. The software doesn’t break down fields into management zones, it actually visualizes the entire field as one entity.

Farmers and their Landus agronomists can run endless scenarios through the digital twins of their various fields to benchmark management practices and what effect they will have on the crop, kind of like how a high-ranking general in the United States Military would use Tesseract technology to wargame various battlefield scenarios before finalizing a mission plan.

The digital platform today remains in development, but the partners are getting very close to releasing the first iteration, and several Landus farmers have been involved in field tests. Illinois farmer Kevin Kennedy is one of a handful that have been granted early access to the Synthesis. He is convinced Synthesis will be a seismic leap forward in farm management information system innovation.

“Having a platform that I can bring all of the different types of data sources into one centralized location, it gives me the foundation I need to use AI toolsets to build these really detailed analyses around so many different scenarios in production,” he says. “We’ve never been able to have enough of our data in one location and have it in a format that we can access and do this type of predictive analysis.”

Leveling the data playing field for farmers

Landus’ SkyScout drone-enabled scouting service is one such data platform that smoothly integrates into the Synthesis platform. Instead of having to log in and run analysis in both platforms, or export huge data sets from one platform into another, all of the data that comes from SkyScout’s flights flows automatically into a linked Synthesis dashboard. The rubber really meets the road where fresh scouting data is combined with the historic field level data that Synthesis also pulls in automatically.

“In Iowa right now a lot of the fields don’t have an average stand, so you’re probably looking at an average crop at best,” Kennedy explains. “This just allows me to have more confidence in my real-time decision-making process.”

According to Boucard, that is exactly what Tesseract set out to do when it started ideating what could happen if it placed its AI-based military wargaming technology in the hands of Midwestern farmers: provide an instant common operating picture for farmers and agronomists to use to immerse themselves in the data and make critical decisions really fast, and really accurately.

“To be able to unlock the power of that farmer-agronomist collaboration and let the farmer share that data intelligently with whomever it makes sense to share it with – the farmer should own all their own data, so we’re giving them the power now,” he says. “That will force multiply and create a market that’s truly competitive rather than dominated.”

To learn more about how Synthesis can help you harness the power of past data, current data, and future outlook data and apply an analytical approach to your farm, get in touch with Landus.

*This story was originally published on AgWeb by Farm Journal (07/24/2024)

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