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# About CropIntel

CropIntel is built and maintained by **Alastair Campbell**
through [Hurricane Works](https://hurricane.works). It started as
a research project in early 2026 and now runs daily in production, fully
public, every call, the per-region breakdown, and the forward-prediction
log are open, no login.

The outputs are public by design. What's *not* public is the
methodology, the curated UK arable practitioner corpus, the lexicon, the
model internals. That's the defensible IP. You can audit every call we've
made; you can't rebuild the engine from the public site.

Acquisition enquiries

CropIntel serves grain merchants, crop insurers, and commodity desks
([see the value to each](/for/grain-merchants)). For an acquisition
conversation about the engine, corpus, and track record:
[alastair@hurricane.works](mailto:alastair@hurricane.works).

## About the author

**Alastair Campbell** built CropIntel after fifteen years
building data products in adjacent industries. He runs Hurricane Works, a
small studio that has shipped consumer-facing data products covering
vehicle pricing, used-car valuations, and B2B market intelligence. Prior
product work includes Carsnip and ongoing operator roles in automotive
data.

The CropIntel project is informed by, but not derived from, that
prior work. The pattern is consistent: a thinly-instrumented market with
fast-moving sentiment and slow-moving official data, where a daily,
region-by-region directional call earns its keep relative to monthly
outlook commentary.

Day-to-day operations: data ingestion, model maintenance, methodology
documentation, and any buyer conversations are handled directly by
Alastair. There is no team dilution between buyer and builder. The system
itself runs autonomously on a documented daily pipeline, so what transfers
is a working production system with a runbook, not a person's calendar.

External:
[Hurricane Works](https://hurricane.works) ·
[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alastaircampbell/)

## Why this exists

UK wheat is a £2bn+ crop with a price formation that's surprisingly
late-binding. By the time DEFRA publishes harvest figures or AHDB releases
its monthly condition reports, the trade has already repriced. Compound
weather stress, satellite canopy data, and real-time farmer reports give
a directional view weeks earlier, at high enough accuracy (62.3% on a
walk-forward backtest) to be useful for actual decisions: forward buying,
hedging, insurance pricing, and parametric reserving.

The system is intentionally narrow: UK wheat, daily cadence, directional
calls only. It is not a multi-commodity global agronomic platform and has
no plans to become one.

## Contact

**Acquisition enquiries, press, or research questions:**
[alastair@hurricane.works](mailto:alastair@hurricane.works)

The model, methodology, curated corpus, public track record, codebase, and
brand are available to acquire by a strategic buyer.
See [the opportunity](/the-opportunity) for the commercial model.

## What we do not provide

- Regulated investment advice. CropIntel is a data product that publishes directional forecasts. Trading involves risk of loss.
- Multi-commodity coverage. UK wheat is the focused product. Barley, OSR, and feed grains are tracked but not separately published.
- Guarantees of accuracy. The 62.3% historical hit rate is statistically validated but no system predicts the future perfectly.
- Real-time alerts (yet). The product cadence is daily. Alerting tooling for paying customers is on the roadmap.

Related: [Methodology](/methodology) ·
[Track Record](/track-record) ·
[The opportunity](/the-opportunity)