Bayer’s digital farming arm improves reliability for critical apps

Climate and Bayer Crop Science Digital Farming are dedicated to helping farmers sustainably increase their productivity through leading software tools and agronomic modeling. From field insights to crop performance analysis, the Climate FieldView™ platform is modernizing farm management by providing a way for users to control and monitor their operations in real-time.

Utilizing solutions offered by Climate and Bayer Crop Science Digital Farming, farmers can collect and store data and monitor progress in real-time as they are working in the field. Climate FieldView provides a wide range of tools and capabilities that seamlessly integrate with nearly all major equipment brands, helping farmers to make informed data-driven decisions that improve their operations.

Climate LLC, the Digital Farming arm of Bayer Crop Science, stands at the forefront of digital agriculture. Their software platform Climate FieldView™ offers a suite of applications that help farmers maximize their annual yield, reduce costs, and operate sustainably. Through the use of Climate FieldView™, farmers in 23 countries around the world are able to drive farm operation efficiency, reduce financial risk, and optimize their use of farm inputs like seeds and pesticides.

Farmers have come to rely on the platform, available on the web, via a mobile app, and in the cabs of most major farm equipment types. The FieldView™ Cab App, a mobile application designed to support farmers during their most sensitive planting, management, and harvest activities, has become a critical tool for Climate’s customers. Outages or malfunctions of the Cab App during these operational windows can cause significant negative downstream effects involving data loss or inaccuracy.

Artie Lee, Climate’s Director of Engineering, regularly seeks out new tools and techniques to improve the reliability of the company’s products. As a part of this, he concluded that he needed to implement feature management across the entire development org.

He saw feature management as critical to application stability, enabling trunk-based development, and controlling the user experience across different app versions and geographies.

Climate’s mobile engineering team, responsible for developing three phone and tablet-based iOS and Android apps, had been using a homegrown feature flagging tool. Primarily, the tool turned features either all the way on or all the way off. This worked fine when the company was small. But as Climate has scaled to nearly 200 million subscribed acres of coverage around the world, they quickly exceeded the capacity of their in-house tool.

In addition to features like fine-grained targeting and real-time flag updates, they needed important enterprise capabilities like a robust architecture, role-based permissions, and audit logs.

Artie and his team felt that trying to reengineer the homegrown solution into a state-of-the-art feature management platform was cost-prohibitive. Perceiving LaunchDarkly as the industry leader in feature management, he adopted the platform accordingly.

Since implementing LaunchDarkly, Artie’s team enjoys greater peace of mind when it comes to application reliability. What’s more, they can confidently deploy features, code changes, and bug fixes in time-sensitive circumstances. 

If the Cab App has a glitch during harvest season, someone on the team can roll back to a known safe state in real-time with LaunchDarkly feature flags. And they can rapidly ship a bug fix without fearing the change will set off other issues.

As a scalable feature flagging solution within Climate FieldView, LaunchDarkly has significantly reduced developer burden. Artie’s team has standardized high-speed, low-risk releases, in part by making feature management a bedrock of their development practices.

They’ve reduced inter-team dependencies when launching features. Rather than endure the perennial headache of merging long-lived feature branches, waiting on code reviews, and running lengthy tests in staging, the team uses feature flags to do trunk-based development. As a result, developer productivity and satisfaction have gone up.

Climate also has far greater control over the product experience with LaunchDarkly. They leverage targeting to enable features based on the user’s mobile app version, location, and other custom attributes. The team also releases incomplete features to internal developers for canary testing in production. Only developers see these non-production features.

All in all, the safeguards and control of LaunchDarkly allow the team to consistently meet key business objectives.

LaunchDarkly frees Artie and his team from having to worry about role-based access controls, audit logs, and other data security concerns that come with feature flagging on a large scale. All of this is handled in the platform.

Moreover, Climate developers have expressed delight with the ease of use and comprehensive feature set, which supports everything from release management and experimentation to operations and software entitlements. But perhaps he is most pleased with the simple fact that LaunchDarkly just works.

Nearly 8 billion people occupy our world. Feeding such an enormous population in a sustainable, eco-friendly way is a tall order. Innovators like those at Climate FieldView are using software to meet this challenge head-on. The investment Climate teams make in feature management is leading to big gains in software reliability, developer productivity, and deployment velocity. These benefits trickle down to the farmers. LaunchDarkly is proud to partner with a company having such a noble mandate.