As it becomes clear that climate change is impacting agriculture as well as all the ancillary relationships to big agriculture, like insurance models for assessing crop failure risk, we’re seeing more startups go after agriculture. They’re hoping to leverage the volume of data available, ranging from on site sensor technology to weather data, to do things like improve crop yield. The acquisition of Climate Corp by Monsanto for almost a billion has helped fuel the belief that there’s money to be made from cross breeding big data with big ag.

Startup Farm Intelligence is working on its own cloud based service that crunches multiple data points ranging from aerial images to sensor data to weather data to alert farmers to potential problems like crop disease. The software has visualization tools that give farmers a broad look at thousands of acres of farm land, and can hopefully help them fend off problems and manage risk. The startup hopes to be able to get into foreign markets like South America where commodities like soybeans occupy huge swaths of farmland.

The company has hinted that if it scales globally it would be managing volumes of data as large as many other well known companies in the data collection business. With sensor technology improving and big data sets like weather data becoming easier to access, the task of data driven agriculture startups will increasingly fall to folks with expertise in cloud and data science.