Delair, a renowned manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles, and BASF, a renowned Germany-based chemical producer, reportedly announced a new partnership to increase the research & development efforts for BASF’s agriculture solutions for traits, seeds, as well as crop protection.

This new partnership would allow agricultural research stations of BASF across the world to utilize the delair.ai cloud platform to standardize and streamline the data gained from drone-based agriculture field studies.

Delair’s AI platform offers industry-specific analytics and enterprise-focused workflows and would also help BASF transform its visual drone information into actionable insights and further into sustainable, innovative solutions for the agricultural industry.

Every year, BASF conducts thousands of research tests in its agricultural stations spread across the world to measure product efficiency and performance under various field conditions.

Manager of the Sensor-based Field Phenotyping for Traits and Seeds at BASF, Greta De Both stated that the company wants to accelerate innovation through the use of digitalization. Collaborating with Delair would help the company gain a better understanding and observation of the crops as well as their surrounding environments, and also decrease the time required to market new agricultural products.

BASF recently unveiled drones that are equipped with multispectral sensors to optimize and automate their field data collection, to gain real-time insights on how plants respond to various environmental conditions. The company would be able to construct digital twins of their research fields from the delair.ai technology. It would also help the company to map and analyze several hectares of plots on all trial sites. The Delair’s cloud platform would enable field agronomists to automatically geo-reference and vectorize microplots and thus generate crop behavior per plot and biological data of a field.

Agriculture and Forestry product manager, Delair, Lénaïc Grignard stated that capturing agricultural information is easier with drones, however the real challenge faced by companies is harnessing all this data so that it is shareable, consumable, and actionable.

Grignard further added that the company is honored to begin this new partnership with BASF and help their efforts in harnessing the power of visual information to make the correct decision at the correct time.

Source credit: https://www.basf.com/global/en/media/news-releases/2020/03/p-20-144.html