I’m excited to announce the launch of Leaf Connect – a new service from Leaf that dramatically accelerates partnerships in food & agriculture. Leaf Connect allows companies to instantly share Field boundaries, Field Operations, and Machine Data Files with their partners via Leaf’s API in a consistent format without having to manage multiple log-ins, downloads, transfers, re-uploads, and translation of data.
We found that in addition to bringing data in, most of our customers also partner with other Agtech companies to offer complimentary services together. This is great! But we also found that a large number of these partnerships were powered by emailing files back and forth, dropping thumb-drives in the mail, or waiting hours for file uploads and downloads with Dropbox or Google Drive. We built Leaf Connect to solve this and make it easier and safer for companies to power their partnerships.
With Leaf Connect, companies can share data with their partners via Leaf. This gives them a simple and secure way to share data with their partners so they can avoid non-secure and unscalable methods and do not need to build and maintain their own API infrastructure, security, documentation, and support in order to enable partnerships. Leaf Connect allows partners to implement quickly, ensure secure data transfer, and use the same Leaf tools that they are already familiar with.
Leaf Connect has enormous potential to benefit the industry. Not only does it power partnerships and accelerate collaboration but it also opens the door for companies and independent developers to build products that are automatically compatible with any other company using Leaf. This means that anyone who integrates with Leaf instantly has a user base that is ready to use their product without any setup or installation.
It’s exciting to see the first few partnerships powered by Leaf Connect go live, hear these companies think of Leaf as their own API, and see developers begin to use Leaf Connect to build and distribute their services.
Powering partnerships
Leaf Connect accelerates partnerships in food and agriculture. With a massive problem space and many companies specializing in different parts of the value chain, nearly every company in the industry chooses to partner with other companies to strengthen their offering. However, these partnerships often get signed with big press releases in weeks while the actual implementation of them happens over the course of months or years. Leaf Connect’s purpose is to change this by dramatically reducing and simplifying the software development work required to implement a partnership.
Leaf Connect accomplishes this by allowing any company using Leaf to request permission, and receive access, to another company’s data. By default, data coming through Leaf is secured by account, meaning that data that is permissioned by a farmer to a company is only available to that company and no others. With Leaf Connect, companies can now request permission from the Farmer and a partner company to allow the partner company to access the farmer’s data via Leaf. If permission is granted, the partner company is able to access the partner’s data in their own Leaf account. Since this is all user-permissioned data, it is important to note that data collaboration only happens between two accounts, and data is never shared broadly across multiple companies. Leaf Connect allows either party to granularly configure which data is being shared, how long it is available, and revoke access at any time. Learn more here.
Use case examples:
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- Farm Management Platform <> Carbon Market: a Farm Management Platform partners with a Carbon Removal Marketplace to provide their farmers with a new source of revenue. The Farm Management Platform already uses Leaf for automatic data entry of Field Boundaries, Field Operations, and translation of local Machine Data files. The Carbon Marketplace uses Leaf to ease onboarding with Field Boundary import from 3rd party APIs and validate historical management practices with Field Operations. Their mutual farmer customer uses the Farm Management Platform to organize their inventory, finances, and field operations. Now the farmer wants to monetize the carbon they sequester via the carbon removal partner. When the partner companies use Leaf Connect, no manual data transfer has to take place. Once the farmer grants permission for the Carbon Marketplace to read their data from the Farm Management Platform, the data is instantly available in Carbon Marketplace’s Leaf account in the same, consistent Leaf format that they already use. This allows the partners to implement quickly, ensure secure data transfer, and use the same Leaf tools that they are already familiar with.
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- Retailer <> Yield cleaning tool: Another example is an Agricultural Retailer working with a specialized Yield Analysis Software in order to provide advice to their farmer customer. The Agricultural Retailer has helped the growers collect and store yield data on their platform for years (using Leaf to translate the files), and now the Agricultural Retailer wants to use this data with the 3rd party Yield Analysis Software to help the farmer make more profitable fertilizing decisions. Thankfully, the Yield Analysis Software is integrated with Leaf, so instead of the Agricultural Retailer having to manually transmit terabytes of yield data from their platform to the Yield Analysis Software, the data is made available to the yield analysis tool instantly once the farmer has granted permission. The Yield Analysis Software retrieves the data via Leaf and returns the recommendation to the Agricultural Retailer.
Get started with Leaf Connect
With Leaf Connect, companies now have the ability to build tools that are automatically compatible with any other company using Leaf. Curious about the technical details of sharing data to other API owners through the Leaf Ecosystem? You can find more details here, or you can contact our team to find out how data sharing can help your organization achieve their goals.
About Leaf
Companies use Leaf’s unified API to become instantly compatible with farm data from hundreds of different platforms and file types via a single integration. Leaf integrates with all major farm data platforms including John Deere, Climate Fieldview, CNHi, Trimble, Planet Labs, Raven, AgLeader, Sentera, Stara, etc. and translates the data from their proprietary formats into consistent GeoJSON.
