An agriculture and mining affiliate program with two tracks

Choosing between the agriculture and mining tracks

Start with who already calls you for advice. If it's growers, farm managers, co-op members or the dealers who sell to them, the agriculture track is the one to use. If it's license holders, junior explorers, geologists or people who broker mining deals, apply for the mining track. A lot of consultants in rural regions know a few people on each side, and the two tracks don't conflict. You can create an agriculture code in the dashboard today and send a separate mining application whenever you're ready.

The tracks also suit different ways of working. Agriculture is volume work: each referral is one farm subscription, and your monthly income builds as more farms sign up and stay. Mining is closer to deal work. You might make three or four introductions in a year, each one takes a conversation or two, and each approved project is a much larger piece of work for us. That's why our agriculture and mining affiliate program runs them as separate tracks with separate terms.

A quick way to decide

• If most of your contacts farm, or advise people who farm, start with agriculture.
• If you know people who hold exploration licenses or set exploration budgets, apply for mining.
• If you publish a blog, channel or newsletter for a farming audience, use agriculture. A promo code and link work well in posts.
• If you're a geologist or GIS consultant with a handful of clients a year, mining is usually the better use of your time, since one approved project can be worth more than many small referrals.

How recurring and per-project commission work in practice

On the agriculture track, commission follows the subscription. When a farm you referred pays us, 20% of that payment is credited to you, and the same thing happens at every renewal for as long as the farm stays subscribed. The 20% is calculated on what the customer actually paid, after their 10% discount. If they add more land and pay more, your share rises with it. If they cancel, it stops. This is what makes it a recurring commission affiliate program: what you earn depends far more on how long people stay than on any single sale.

Here's a hypothetical example, with no prices attached. An agronomist refers six growers in spring. Four keep their subscriptions through the season and two renew the following year. She's paid 20% of each of those payments, month by month, and nothing further for the two growers who cancelled after their first month.

The mining track pays per project. If your application is shortlisted, we agree the commission with you on a call, and it applies to each exploration project you introduce that we approve and take on. We don't publish a rate, because projects range from a single license to multi-license portfolios that we deliver in phases. For people looking for a high ticket affiliate program, this is the track that fits: fewer referrals, and larger engagements behind each one.

Who does well as a Farmonaut affiliate

The affiliates who do well usually have a small group of people who trust them, rather than a big audience. Think of an agronomist with forty client farms, an input dealer whose counter staff talk to growers every morning, a co-op that emails members once a month, or a geologist who has worked on half the licenses in a district. They recommend something they've checked for themselves, so they can answer the first questions a grower or exploration manager asks.

A few habits make a real difference:

• You've looked at a field report on a real field, or a sample mineral report, before you recommend it.
• You bring it up when it's relevant, such as before planting, when irrigation starts, or before a client commits to a drilling budget.
• You stay involved after the sign-up and help the grower read their first couple of reports.
• You're realistic about what satellite data can and can't do, and say so.

The people who struggle are usually the ones who post a code to large groups with no context. Farmers and exploration managers are careful buyers, and a code from a stranger rarely gets used.

Explaining satellite crop monitoring and mineral detection to your network

You don't need to explain remote sensing. Explain what the person gets. For a farmer, it goes like this: they map a field once, by searching its address, drawing it on the map or uploading a KML or shapefile. After that, each new satellite pass updates a report with crop health, how much water the crop needs over the next seven days, soil readings, an expected yield, pest and disease risk, and fertilizer doses for five nutrients. We use radar as well as optical satellites, so cloudy weeks don't leave gaps. The full feature list is on our satellite crop monitoring page.

If someone wants to know how it works, one or two sentences are enough. Satellites such as the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 photograph the same field about every five days, at 10-meter detail, in visible and near-infrared light. Healthy leaves reflect a lot of near-infrared light, and indices such as NDVI turn that into a measure of how the crop is doing.

For a mining client, talk about where to spend fieldwork money first. We combine eight families of satellite data over their license, including optical, short-wave infrared, radar, thermal, terrain and magnetics, and rank the zones most likely to host their target mineral. They get Exploration Targets with a location, depth and estimated quantity for each zone, in under 5 days once we have a usable boundary. Say clearly that these come before a JORC or NI 43-101 resource estimate and don't replace one. Geologists will trust you more for saying it. Details are on the satellite mineral detection page.

How referrals are tracked and paid

Tracking works differently on each side of the agriculture and mining affiliate program. On the agriculture side, it runs through your promo code and share link. You create the code in the affiliate dashboard, usually from your name (something like FARMONAUT7), and the dashboard also gives you a link that opens our plans with the 10% discount already shown. A farm that enters your code at checkout, or subscribes through your link, is credited to you. If someone subscribes without either one, there's nothing to connect them to you, so remind people to use it.

The dashboard shows your total earnings, a monthly breakdown, how often your code was used and which trial subscriptions became paid ones. You can export all of it as a CSV. Payouts go out on the 5th of each month, by bank transfer or PayPal, to whichever method you've set as the default.

The mining track has no dashboard and no code. You introduce a project directly to our partnerships team, and that introduction is the record of your referral. Once we've reviewed the project, the commission we agreed with you applies if we take it on, and it's paid as agreed for that project.

Whichever track you're on, you're responsible for declaring affiliate income and paying any tax due where you live. We can't give tax advice, so ask an accountant if you're unsure how commission is treated.

Disclosing that you're an affiliate

If you earn a commission from a recommendation, the people reading or hearing it should know. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission expects affiliates to clearly disclose a material connection, such as a commission, close to the recommendation and in words people will notice and understand. Its page on the FTC Endorsement Guides and what people are asking covers affiliate links in blogs, videos and social posts. Other countries have their own advertising rules, so check the ones that apply where you publish. The same expectation covers both tracks of the agriculture and mining affiliate program, including a mining introduction made in person.

In practice, this is simple. A line such as "I earn a commission if you subscribe with my code" next to the code works in a post or newsletter. In a video, say it out loud as well as putting it in the description. In a one-to-one conversation with a client, just tell them. Many consultants find that clients who know about the commission, and who also see them checking the field reports together, are more comfortable with the recommendation. This is general information and isn't legal advice.

How this compares with other agriculture affiliate programs

Most agriculture affiliate programs fall into two groups. Retailers of seed, tools, garden supplies and equipment usually pay a one-time percentage on each order, often tracked by a browser cookie that expires after a set number of days. Software and data subscriptions, which is where Farmonaut sits, more often pay a share of recurring payments. Both are reasonable, and they suit different audiences.

A product program can be the better choice if your audience mostly buys supplies and equipment and rarely pays for software. Ours makes more sense when you work with commercial growers, consultancies and agribusinesses that manage enough land to want field data every season, which is also why it works as an agtech affiliate program for platforms and app builders. We've written a longer roundup of farming affiliate programs if you want to compare options before you choose.