How Combyne Connect Makes Grain Marketing Easier for Farmers

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If you’re here, you’ve probably already heard of Combyne. But you might not yet know about Combyne Connect! We wanted to take some time today to go through a quick “what you need to know” about our vision for Combyne Connect, and illustrate how farmers will be able to use Combyne Connect in the near future to become more effective grain marketers.

Our vision for Combyne Connect

It’s our API ecosystem that farmers will be able to use to connect Combyne to both their farm tools and buyer tools, to bring their relevant crop marketing data all together in a single place. You might be wondering, “What’s an API?” It’s simply a way for two or more software systems to talk to each other, making it easier and more efficient to flow information from one to the other. We like to think of it as “pipes” that connect different software tools.

Why is Combyne building Combyne Connect?

The Combyne app is a crop marketing management tool designed to help farmers make more informed marketing decisions. As the Combyne team spoke with farmers, we quickly realized that in order for them to make the best decisions they can, they needed a way to see all of their marketing information in a centralized place that would automatically update as new information comes in. So we’re building a suite of APIs that can do just that.

Just like how the combine harvester combined many different machine functions together into a single piece of equipment to make harvesting easier, we’re helping combine all the relevant crop marketing information a farmer wants to have into a single app to make marketing easier; that’s why we’re named Combyne.

How will Combyne Connect help farmers make more informed marketing decisions?

Farmers will be able to connect their Combyne accounts to their “back office” tools, including precision ag tools, farm management software, bin management systems, grain cart software, and ag accounting tools to connect (or comb[y]ne, as we like to say!) info relevant to crop marketing to their Combyne account.

For example, farmers often tell us that they want a complete view of their inventory. After all, you need to know what you have to know what you can sell. But, farmers often manage specific pieces of their inventory in specific tools; they keep track of stored grain in their bin management system, actual harvested totals using their grain cart system, and anticipated yields in their precision ag tool. Combyne Connect will enable farmers to roll up their inventory from these different tools into a single comprehensive view of inventory totals across the whole farm. After doing so, farmers can then start seeing things like “Across my whole farm, I’ve got 20,000 bushels of canola that isn’t sold yet.”

How will Combyne Connect bring trade documents together into a single place?

Another way Combyne Connect can help farmers make more informed decisions is by bringing all their trade documents together, especially for farmers that work with multiple buyers. Let’s take a grain contract, for example. Right now, farmers can upload their contracts in Combyne either by typing the information in, or by taking a photo of their paper contract, which Combyne will turn into a digital record. 

In the near future, farmers will also be able to import their grain contracts directly from their grain buyers by using Combyne Connect. Combyne will enable farmers to connect their Combyne account to the grain buyer’s digital tools that are generating the contract, and automatically import the digital version of the contract, and the associated load tickets and settlements, into the farmer’s account. By doing so, farmers will finally be able to get a holistic view of all their crop sales – regardless of how many buyers they work with – in a single place. With their trade documents in the app, Combyne then reconciles those contracts against their inventory to understand things like “Across my entire inventory, I’m 25% sold on oats.”

What tools are connected to Combyne Connect?

Combyne’s approach is to integrate with other farmer-centric companies that are trying to make farmer’s lives easier; our goal is to connect to other tools to enable efficient and seamless crop marketing workflows and automate the process for farmers as much as possible. Through integrations, Combyne also enables our partners’ tools to be more impactful by providing farmers with the ability to re-use information in their tool for multiple business needs.

Our partners also appreciate that by working together, we’re building a better combined farmer experience than what we could both provide individually. So far, our initial partners include bin management system OPI Systems and bid aggregation platform Farmbucks, but we have much more in store. Combyne is building out our partner ecosystem across 2023, so if you have specific tools you’d like to connect your Combyne account to, please let us know by making a request here! Or, if you’re another farmer-centric company that’s interested in working with Combyne, please get in touch here.