Antara Agronomy Services was awarded the Agri-Business Award in the Ag Day’s Innovation Showcase this week for their Antara Insights 2.0 program.
Brunel and Jennifer Sabourin live in St. Jean Baptists, MB. They started their company 10 years ago out of a need to provide more answers for local farmers. The program is meant to collect local data, giving the tools to local farmers to make more insightful decisions.
"The farmers just didn't want the standard answers they'd get from commodities, or larger national retailers," says Jennifer Sabourin. "We wanted local answers to improve productivity and obviously the farmer's bottom line. And to figure out what is best in our area. Small data before big data."
All input measures, seeding strategies, crop maintenance and harvesting data are collected for baselining that specific crop. Using this history, gives greater insight into next year's growing season when considering the changing variables.
Sabourin says Insights 2.0 is the next evolution of Antara’s award-winning agronomy benchmarking service. New features such as field specific weather, input cost analysis and planter report cards give additional insights that help turn your data into decisions.
"We're really bringing it down to the decisions that a farmer has any kind of influence on," explains Sabourin. "You can't influence the weather. You can't influence politics. And you can't influence the markets. But you can influence what you buy, your inputs. And we want farmers to have solid data that they can use to make those decisions."
Antara came in runner-up last year in the Innovation Showcase. But additions to the program over the past year landed them first place in the Agri-Business Award category at this year's Ag Days. Improvements included adding in the cost of production as well as data collected from their own weather network to upgrade to the Insights 2.0 program.
Please listen to more with Jennifer Sabouris below on the program, and the upgrades to this new version.