BASF has announced plans to expand its services and initiatives for growers and agricultural professionals worldwide through a significant investment in the development of new IT tools.
The new integrated tools will be designed to help growers make agronomic decisions, manage their business operations and better connect to the global agricultural community. As part of this investment, BASF is establishing strategic partnerships with agricultural service and data providers, with particular focus areas in data management, predictive analytics and information processing.
BASF will be working with John Deere to jointly develop a suite of integrated precision farming and farm management solutions for improved execution in the field.
“BASF and John Deere are two leading suppliers in the agricultural business sector and have many years of experience in managing agricultural data,” said Markus Heldt, President of BASF’s Crop Protection division. “The real value comes from helping growers to interpret this data so they can make more precise and efficient decisions about their crops and operations.”
As part of the agreement, BASF will offer a new service for field scouting and agronomic decision support. John Deere will provide a new application for sprayer setup as well as integration of field data via its collaborative farm management portal ‘MyJohnDeere.com’, which will enable growers to better manage their farm operations.
“By integrating BASF’s agronomic expertise with field-proven John Deere application expertise, we will provide a comprehensive management platform that will be open to other partners as well,” said Christoph Wigger, John Deere Vice President Sales & Marketing Region 2. “Instead of combining existing tools, we will concentrate our research and development efforts on those innovative solutions that intuitively address growers’ needs across the entire crop production value chain.”
The goal is to launch the first joint integrated tools by the end of 2014 in key agricultural markets with additional markets to follow.
Listen to an interview here with Nevin McDougall, BASF Senior Vice President Crop Protection North America, where he explains more about these new developments. [wpaudio url=”http://zimmcomm.biz/basf/basf-announcements-nevin.mp3″ text=”Interview with Nevin McDougall, BASF”]