08.06.2025 | 2 min read

Soil Under Pressure: Why Data-Driven Decisions Are the Foundation of Resilient Growing

Soil under pressure blog main image-min

By Darryn Keiller, Founder and CEO, WayBeyond

The soil beneath our feet is under pressure.

High saturation production has had devastating effects on soil, and long-term potential yields. Climate change has intensified weather and temperature events, which have also promoted more frequent and intense pest and pathogen outbreaks, in some cases, rendering farmland unusable altogether.

It’s not just climate change. It’s the pace of it, the unpredictability, and the increasing strain on growers to make fast, high-stakes decisions—often with limited, fragmented, or confusing data.

In horticulture, that’s a risk no one can afford.

Most growers today aren’t short on data.

They’re short on clarity.

That’s why we’ve built FarmRoad not just to collect information, but to translate it into insight. And that’s why companies like Costa Group are using it—not only in daily operations, but in breeding programs that shape the next decade of crop production.

When a new blueberry variety takes 8 to 10 years to bring to market, every environmental data point matters. Every signal from the field, the substrate, or the atmosphere plays a role in determining whether that variety will thrive, not just today, but in the climate we’ll face a decade from now.

With FarmRoad, data doesn’t just support production—it enables smarter R&D, stronger pipelines, and more resilient decisions across climates and crop lifecycles.

Some of our customers use FarmRoad for:

  • Frost risk mitigation

  • Plant stress response

  • Disease forecasting (including Botrytis and Late Blight)

  • Optimized irrigation and nutrient cycles

  • Infrastructure life cycle management

We’re building the largest horticultural dataset of its kind—over 3.5 billion individual data points and more than 9,900 weeks of optimal condition modeling—because the industry doesn’t just need more data. It needs connected, contextualized insight that growers can act on.

Resilience in horticulture isn’t hypothetical.

It’s data-driven, practical, and already underway.

Platforms like FarmRoad are giving growers what they need most: clarity. And that clarity translates to better yield, higher quality, less waste—and a stronger, more resilient supply chain.

We’re proud to be part of that shift.