May 21, 2020

Preemptive pest control aided by FMC’s precision agriculture platform

FMC Corp. has announced a precision agriculture platform designed to enable growers to more accurately predict pest pressure before it becomes problematic.

Arc farm intelligence is the first mobile platform to use predictive modeling based on real-time data to help ensure the right crop protection products are applied precisely where and when they are needed to improve sustainability, optimize crop yield and enhance grower return on investment (ROI).

The platform offers a full suite of features, including customized alerts through a mobile app to indicate when action is needed in a field, two-way communication with FMC agronomists, reliable data and high-quality graphics, including graphs and heat maps. Arc farm intelligence has been engineered with open APIs and can easily be plugged into growers’ existing digital ecosystems.

“Our first offering under the Arc farm intelligence platform utilizes aggregated historical data, entomological models, hyper-local weather data and real-time regional pest mapping to increase a grower’s confidence when making insect management decisions,” said Sara Sterling, director of precision agriculture at FMC. “Powered by advanced scouting and machine learning, this tool predicts insect pressure one week in advance with more than 90% confidence for key insects in select crops.

“Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive in Brazil and Greece, where it has been used on cotton, and we look forward to introducing Arc farm intelligence in additional countries and crops.”

The platform will be launched commercially in Greece (the week of May 25-29) for cotton. Also, it is being piloted in other countries, including Brazil, Spain and the U.S., on a broad range of crops from brassicas to corn to lettuce. The Arc farm intelligence app will be available for growers in Greece for free from the Android and iOS app stores.

Other FMC precision agriculture platforms include 3RIVE 3D application technology, an at-plant crop protection delivery system that helps growers efficiently cover more ground in less time with fewer refills, which saves water, fuel, labor and time; and PrecisionPac solutions, a dispensing system that minimizes waste with custom herbicide blends specific to each grower’s field size and weed spectrum.