The National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA) named Mike Stern, CEO of The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of Monsanto Company (No. 43 on the Fair360, formerly DiversityInc Top 50 Companies list), as the 2017 Agribusiness Leader of the Year.
This agriculture industry award recognizes outstanding leadership in private, public or academic service. It is conferred each year to a senior agribusiness executive who exemplifies excellence in agribusiness, and has also made significant contributions to the industry. The Agribusiness Leader of the Year award is NAMA’s highest honor.
Stern embodies the spirit of the award through his understanding of the challenges farmers face and his passion for solving agriculture’s most pressing issue: the need to feed a growing population while minimizing the impact on the environment. Stern and his team are on the forefront of solving this problem through digital agriculture, which holds the potential to unlock the next giant leap in farming productivity and efficiency.
Through the combination of seamless connectivity of farm data, real-time data visualization and insights driven by advanced data science, Climate is helping farmers gain a deeper understanding of their fields with its Climate FieldView digital agriculture platform. These tools are already making a significant difference for farmers across the United States and other areas around the globe, helping improve their efficiency in managing seeding and planting, fertility and crop health, and ultimately supporting all of the key decisions they make each year to optimize crop productivity.
Since joining Climate in 2014, Stern has guided the company’s growth from serving 35 million crop acres to more than 100 million acres. In less than two growing seasons, the Climate FieldView platform has quickly become the most broadly connected platform in the United States. Under Stern’s leadership, the Climate FieldView platform has continued to expand into new, global regions, including recent expansion into Canada and Brazil.
In November 2016, the company acquired VitalFields, a European farm management software company based in Tallinn, Estonia, marking Climate’s first step into the European market. The company plans to bring the Climate FieldView platform to Europe, South Africa, Australia and Argentina over the next few years.
Most recently, the Climate FieldView platform was selected by the Business Intelligence Group as one of five Chairman’s Choice winners of the 2017 BIG Innovation Awards, signifying Climate FieldView as one of the top five product innovations of 2017.
To further Climate’s commitment to advancing innovation, the company unveiled the most robustdigital agriculture research and development pipeline in January 2017, to continue providing farmers new digital technologies to help them better understand field variability and customize their agronomic practices to get the most out of every acre.
For more information about The Climate Corporation and the Climate FieldView platform, visitwww.climate.com.
