Bayer & Hamburg University together seeking new solutions for sustainable agriculture

Bayer and the Institute of Geography and Department of Informatics at the University of Hamburg are entering into a five-year research partnership aimed at jointly developing new, digital solutions for sustainable agriculture based on geoinformatics methods and models.

In a press release, Bayer said the project will leverage relevant geobasic data such as soil, climate, terrain and usage parameters for IT-based visualization of the consequences of agricultural processes.

Bayer said these models will help farmers all over the world make operational decisions, in particular in regard to selecting the right seed, the targeted use of crop protection agents and agricultural production inputs and appropriate scheduling of site-specific arable farming measures. Precise weather and soil data are becoming increasingly important in modern agriculture to optimise crop-growing and the deployment of available agricultural resources, and are an important element for further minimizing harm to the environment and avoiding damage to adjacent natural ecosystems when farming agricultural land, it said.

“With the University of Hamburg, we have found a competent partner which will help us to further advance our activities in the field of digital agriculture,” said Tobias Menne, head of Digital Farming at Bayer. “The teams of Professor Böhner and Professor Ludwig have a great deal of experience in the spatial and temporal modeling of environmental processes. Working together with them will help us better understand and model regional field conditions – including small-scale climatic peculiarities – in the future so that we can adjust agricultural practices accordingly.”

“Besides the scientific challenge, our main objective is to make agricultural processes resource-efficient, which involves optimising crop protection applications and improving environmental protection,” said Professor Jürgen Böhner, scientific head of the Institute of Geography at the University of Hamburg. “We are convinced that combining the expertise of both partners will generate innovative ideas for the agriculture of the future.”