New study offers a glimpse into differences between booming precision agriculture platforms

Swiss agtech company OneSoil has published a new study comparing the five popular platforms that had all the necessary features: Cropwise Operations, owned by Syngenta, a global agricultural technology company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland; xarvio Field Manager, developed by the German company BASF Digital Farming GmbH; and OneSoil, GeoPard, and EOSDA Crop Monitoring, developed by independent teams. The research shows how each platform handles the task in practice and helps farmers and agronomists choose the one that fits their needs.

Farmers face unpredictable weather and rising fertilizer costs, so more of them are planting seeds according to productivity zones, with higher rates in the more fertile parts of the field. Specialized platforms can automate this work, but there are now dozens of startups and scaleups offering precision agriculture tools, according to some estimates, and it is hard to tell them apart. The study gives farmers a comparison based on one real task instead of feature lists.

© OneSoil

To keep it fair, the OneSoil team ran the same variable-rate seeding task on one field in Eastern Europe through all five platforms. The task covered three stages: creating and reviewing productivity zones, assigning seeding rates, and exporting a prescription map that machinery can read. The company also looked at soil sampling, field trials, yield analysis, bulk map creation, AI assistants and scouting. It then compared the results, noted the differences, and turned them into recommendations.

The main finding is that the right platform depends on the team's tasks, its available data, and how much of the work it wants to do itself. Teams without yield maps or time to select satellite images may prefer platforms that build multi-year zones automatically, such as OneSoil and xarvio Field Manager. Teams with their own soil, yield and terrain data and someone to weigh them may prefer GeoPard or EOSDA Crop Monitoring, which combine several data layers. Only OneSoil and GeoPard offered field trials and bulk map creation in the versions tested. Farms already working within the Syngenta or BASF ecosystem may prefer Cropwise Operations or xarvio, which those companies develop. Whichever platform a team picks, it should set aside time for setup, such as uploading data.

"On paper, most precision agriculture platforms offer the same set of tools: productivity zones, prescription maps, and export to machinery. The differences appear when you follow one task from start to finish: who selects the source data, how much the user has to decide, and what happens after the map has been applied. But it is hard to learn that without first trying all of those tools. And that requires time and money. With our guide, farmers can skip that testing step and go straight to the most relevant choice for them." said Michał Pradzynski, OneSoil Chief Agronomist.

For more information:

OneSoil

Email: [email protected]

https://onesoil.ai/