Geolocation giant enters irrigation market with New Zealand-based asset acquisition
Trimble Navigation Ltd. on Tuesday expanded its agriculture business with a trio of acquisitions to strengthen its water management expertise and boost the monitoring and reporting capabilities of its Connected Farm online portal.
Terms of the deals were not disclosed. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based, publicly traded (Nasdaq: TRMB) Trimble, with $2 billion in 2012 revenue, uses positioning technologies – GPS, lasers and optics – to focus on applications requiring position or location, including surveying, construction, agriculture, fleet and asset management, public safety and mapping.
The company said it has acquired the assets of privately-held RainWave, LLC, a provider of precipitation monitoring services and civil engineering firm, Hydro-Engineering Solutions, LLC, both located in Auburn, Ala.
Trimble also said it expects to close on the acquisition of assets of IQ Irrigation, a New Zealand-based software company which uses GPS to optimize irrigation systems, by the end of the month.
The company’s new Connected Farm online dashboard allows farmers to manage operations by viewing key information such as weather forecasting, rainfall totals, commodity prices, field operation maps, and fleet locations.
Both RainWave and IQ Irrigation data will be part of the Connected Farm dashboard, with the latter’s irrigation pivot data expected to be available on the dashboard in the fourth quarter of 2013 in New Zealand and the first half of 2014 in the United States, Trimble said.
