An Important Partnership for Digital Farming’s Future

One of the central opportunities that bring me into work each day is the chance we have to improve lives and livelihoods around the world through data science and engineering solutions that help farmers lower risk, increase productivity, and enhance sustainability to address major societal challenges. 

The sorts of broad, global challenges that agriculture and the food chain of the future will experience can only be solved through a collaborative spirit, openness to change, and a growth mindset. 

That very mindset is why I am so excited to announce the Bayer digital farming partnership with Microsoft, launching today. This endeavor will not only set sights on new innovation horizons for digital farming, but will open the door to further partnership and participation in a more sustainable, productive, traceable, and efficient global food value chain.

Bayer and Microsoft share a similar commitment to science-based solutions that address the future challenges wrought by climate change. Accelerating innovation to optimize how we convert precious natural resources into food, feed, fuel and fiber is essential to ensure more sustainable agricultural production into the future.

As this partnership comes together, Bayer and Microsoft will co-develop digital solutions for agriculture and industries adjacent to agriculture. This framework will serve as the foundation for the Bayer Digital Farming capabilities currently available to our grower customers. Additionally, from entrepreneurs to large-scale enterprises, organizations across the world will be able to leverage these solutions as they look to understand and improve their part of the food value chain using data science.

Placing the right information in the right hands to enable the right decisions is a core tenet of this partnership. This infrastructure, leveraging the cloud computing capabilities of Microsoft Azure, capitalizes on the extensive experience Microsoft has in developing, deploying, and supporting enterprise solutions.

Bayer Digital Farming teams will continue to innovate with industry-leading digital farming solutions at an accelerated pace under this partnership. Enabling our teams to advance and scale-up digital farming capabilities around the world will be an important step to unlock innovation for the entire industry, from startups to mature innovators.

Climate FieldView™ will remain critical to our ability to achieve the vision inherent in this partnership, newly empowered by an enhanced infrastructure bringing together the strengths of both organizations.

This partnership represents the first step in a long journey that not only positively affects the way we reach our customers and develop new capabilities, but effects new ways for new industries touching the food value chain to make them more resilient, sustainable, and durable.

The challenges ahead – for our businesses, for farmers, and for the world – are hard to overstate. But innovation rises from challenge, necessity is the mother of invention, and with the help of many skilled individuals and teams across both our organizations, I am excited to help farmers around the world meet their evolving needs with technology that revolutionizes the future of food.