BASF joins up with Delair to accelerate research for agricultural solutions

BASF and Delair, a global provider of end-to-end visual data management solutions for enterprises, are collaborating to scale up BASF’s research and development projects for seeds, traits and crop protection. The agreement will enable BASF’s agricultural research stations worldwide to use the delair.ai cloud platform to streamline and standardise the information gained through drone-based field studies.

The delair.ai platform provides enterprise-focused workflows and industry-specific analytics and will help BASF turn its visual drone data into actionable insights and ultimately, new sustainable solutions for the agricultural market.

Each year, BASF conducts several thousands of research trials in agricultural stations throughout the globe to measure product performance under different field conditions.

“As a research driven agricultural company, we want to use the full potential of digitalisation to accelerate innovation. Partnering with Delair will help us to get a deeper understanding of the observed crops and their surrounding environments, and reduce the time to market for new products,” said Ms. Greta De Both, Manager of Sensor-based Field Phenotyping for Seeds & Traits at BASF.

BASF recently introduced drones equipped with multispectral sensors to automate and optimise their field data collection, allowing real-time insights into how plants respond to environmental conditions. In delair.ai, BASF will be able to build digital twins of their research fields, as well as map and analyse hectares of plots across all trial sites. The cloud platform will enable field agronomists to automatically vectorise as well as geo-reference microplots and generate biological data and crop behaviour per plot.

“While capturing agricultural data is easier than ever with drones, the real challenge enterprises face is harnessing all of this data so that it is consumable, shareable, and actionable,” said Mr. Lénaïc Grignard, Agriculture and Forestry product manager at Delair. “We are honoured to start this new partnership with BASF and help them harness the power of visual data to make the right decisions at the right time.”