Bayer has announced an update on its collaboration with Microsoft at Agritechnica, a prominent agricultural machinery trade fair. The partnership addresses the agriculture sector's data interoperability challenges by introducing new data connectors. These connectors enable the secure and compliant exchange of farm data between Bayer's digital farming product, Climate FieldView™, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) through Microsoft's Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.
The collaboration's goal is to empower farmers to efficiently collect, share, and benefit from the data they generate. Jeremy Williams, Head of Climate LLC and Digital Farming for Bayer’s Crop Science Division, emphasized the significant technological evolution in agriculture, highlighting the need for farmers to leverage these advancements. The collaboration introduces infrastructure, data connectors, and capabilities to unlock the potential of digital farming, fostering better connectivity and data interoperability for sustainability programs.
Initiated by a farmer, the data connectors facilitate automatic synchronization of planting, application, and harvest activity files from FieldView for enterprise customers across the agri-food value chain. This allows the seamless exchange of data between solutions built on Azure Data Manager.
A key challenge in agricultural technology has been the lack of data interoperability, hindering connections beyond on-farm platforms. Bayer's data connectors for OEMs, developed in collaboration with Sonata Software, provide secure and compliant connectivity to key data sources for farm machinery data. This integration includes connectivity with leading OEMs like Stara, Topcon, and Trimble, reducing the technical investment costs for enterprises.
The collaboration expands Bayer's AgPowered Services, allowing organizations to connect to additional data sources such as weather and imagery. Azure Data Manager becomes a unified platform, streamlining access to farm machinery data, weather information, and insights from AgPowered Services. Overall, the initiative aims to enhance connectivity, reduce technical barriers, and create a more streamlined and efficient agricultural data ecosystem.
Source: farmersreviewafrica.com