ClimateAi Helps Advanta Climate-Proof its Business from End-to-End

March 24th, 2023

Leading Australian seed company Advanta Seeds was experiencing climate change-fueled weather variability, which was hurting its seed production and sales. Publicly available data and out-of-the-box climate tools weren’t meeting Advanta’s need for granular and actionable insights at specific time scales.

Challenge 1: Climate-Proofing Advanta’s Supply Chain

Advanta needed reliable forecasts to design climate-proof seed varieties for the future. It found that in a given year, there was 30-50% revenue volatility based on whether the right product was on the market. Even scarier — it takes Advanta ten years to develop a product, so if the team misunderstands the future market (including future climate), the company could see losses of 30-50% every year.

Challenge 2: Understanding Future Sales and Marketing Opportunities

The team needed more actionable insights that could help it understand the metrics that moved markets, in order to determine market size and find optimal markets to target for the coming years. It wanted to understand demand for the next year and years ahead for Advanta products, and how the geographies in which they sell today will evolve, to ensure sustainable future sales markets.

ClimateAi’s ClimateLens-Enterprise platform, including seasonal and long-term climate forecasting, as well as its climate analogs search function, allowed Advanta to understand key risks to its seasonal production across its supply chain and to sales territories.

Results

With these insights, Advanta could make better-informed decisions that enabled viable quality seed production, optimized R&D, prevented losses, captured new sales, assessed capital expenditures, and increased grower loyalty.

In particular:

ClimateAi’s seasonal forecast accurately projected wet conditions at harvest, which informed Advanta’s decision to harvest the seed early, maintaining its quality and sellability — preventing losses between hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars, in just one season
ClimateAi’s highly accurate predictive modeling identified an unexpected precipitation event two months out in a key location before any other tools. As a result, Advanta was able to bag and transport seed there before its competitors, with the faster time-to-market leading to a 5-10% sales increase.

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