Bayer and Hamburg University collaborate to develop new digital solutions for sustainable agriculture

Bayer and the University of Hamburg (Institute of Geography and Department of Informatics), have agreed to enter into a five-year research partnership aiming at the joint development of new digital solutions for a sustainable agriculture based on geoinformatics methods and models. The project will leverage relevant geobasic data such as soil, climate, terrain and other parameters for IT-based visualization of agricultural processes.

These models will help farmers all over the world making operational decisions, in particular in regard to selecting the right seed, the right crop protection agents and the appropriate scheduling of site-specific measures. Precise weather and soil data are becoming increasingly important in modern agriculture to optimize crop-growing and the deployment of available agricultural resources, those analytics are further minimizing the impact on the environment and avoiding damage to adjacent natural ecosystems.

“With the University of Hamburg, we have found a competent partner which will help us to 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 – so in the future agricultural practices can be adjusted.”

“Besides the scientific challenge, our main objective is to make agricultural processes resource-efficient, which involves optimizing crop protection applications” 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.”

The Department of Physical Geography is part of the Department Earth Sciences at University of Hamburg, The System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA), one of the leading IT platforms for geodata analysis and geoscientific modeling, has got a unique status among geoscientific research facilities. The Department of Informatics uses parallel computer architectures to reduce the processing times of numerical simulations and to cooperate closely with the German Climate Computing Center.