Smart Solutions for a Sustainable Future
Farms have always produced data. But throughout agriculture’s 10,000 year history, most of it has remained out of reach. Today, new digital tools are helping farmers access these insights to harness unprecedented opportunities for their farms, their communities, and our planet. With the power of this data at their fingertips, farmers are also better able to address the evolving challenges we all face, whether it’s helping to ensure global food security, fight climate change or conserve precious natural resources.
A Smarter Toolbox
The right tools make all the difference. This is especially true in agriculture, where farmers must navigate an ever-evolving landscape of changing weather patterns, environmental conditions, consumer demands, regulatory requirements and countless other factors. That’s where digital solutions come in. By providing additional insight into what’s happening in their fields, farmers can make better use of their time and resources to focus on what matters most at any given time. That’s better for them, for their operation and for our planet.
Learn more about some of the many digital tools that are changing the face of agriculture for good.
Digital Farming Platforms
Digital applications like Climate FieldView™ are enabling farmers to collect and analyze billions of data from their fields to help make better, more informed decisions that can also improve harvests. This digital platform provides a complete picture of precisely what’s happening in the field so that farmers can make the best use of their resources. With this insight, farmers know when to apply the right product, in the right place, at the right time, and in the ideal amount. In addition to giving individual plants what they need in order to thrive, this precision also helps farmers to conserve their inputs, cut costs and save precious time they can devote to other aspect of their operation.
Smart Drones
Aerial drones are taking agriculture to new heights by providing farmers with valuable new perspectives into their operations. Many of these drones are even equipped with special imaging technology that can provide vital information about plant health throughout the field. These multispectral cameras can reveal when plants are impacted by various degrees of crop stress – e.g. pests, disease or drought – before it’s visible to the naked eye. This insight alone allows farmers to address each threat before it takes hold.
In-Field Soil Sensors
Healthy soil is the foundation for thriving crops. That’s why in-field soil sensors are an increasingly important tool on the farm. This proprietary digital technology enables farmers to monitor detailed soil conditions such as moisture and nutrient levels—all in real time. Using geo-location, these in-field sensors enable farmers to conserve more water and other resources by knowing precisely where to apply specific inputs so they don’t waste any on plants that don’t need them.
Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence
Digital tools are advancing agriculture even beyond farmers’ fields. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are accelerating the pace and success of plant breeding innovations by accurately predicting genetic outcomes during trials. Coupled with other innovations, AI is helping us deliver more sustainable solutions, faster. Similarly, robust data analytics platforms are transforming what’s possible throughout the entire farming ecosystem. In particular, our partnership with Microsoft is ushering a new wave of innovation in digital agriculture, which will help more farmers benefit from cloud-based tools, real-time data analytics, and other ongoing developments in data science.
Smart Combines
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly at-home on the farm. In particular, smart combines can make incredible use of the collective insights that sync across other devices in an increasingly digital ecosystem. Equipped with its own sensors that collect billions of data points, smart combines are helping farmers optimize their resource use. In particular, precision planters couple GPS data with historical and forecast field information to plant the right seeds at the ideal depth, density, and location in the field to maximize their chances of success throughout the season. As a result, this highly automated process also helps conserve fuel and reduce the associated carbon emissions.
Our Digital Solutions
The ongoing potential of automation, digital tools and data helps inspire new ways to drive innovation throughout our R&D pipeline that can help streamline how we work to reduce our environmental footprint and transform our customers’ experience. Increasingly intricate data is providing insights that enable us to assess and improve our products better than ever by understanding even more about how they are used and how they perform. As such, we’re better able to breed seeds that are custom-designed to thrive in specific regions, climates and soil types. And by providing farmers with these new datasets, we can create new tailored solutions that best support the decisions they make every day from planting to harvest.