DELAIR & BASF Collaborate to Strengthen Agricultural Research with Drone-Based Field Study

A renowned French drone data services company DELAIR recently announced a major agreement with BASF, a German agricultural solutions firm. The collaboration aims at escalating BASF’s research and development projects for seeds, traits and crop protection.  

Speaking of the collaboration, DELAIR’s spokesperson said, “BASF’s agricultural research stations worldwide will now use the delair.ai cloud platform to streamline the information gained through drone-based field studies and scale up their projects for seeds, traits and crop protection.” 

This agreement will enable worldwide agricultural research stations of BASF to use the delair.ai cloud platform to streamline and form standardization of the information gained through drone-based field studies. With delair.ai platform, the research stations will be able to gain enterprise-focused workflows and industry-specific analytics, which will further help BASF turn its visual drone data into real-time insights. The whole process will, thereby, provide new sustainable solutions for the agricultural market. 

Every year, BASF conducts thousands of research trials in agricultural stations throughout the globe to measure the impact and performance of its products under different field conditions. Greta de Both, Manager of Sensor-based Field Phenotyping for Seeds & Traits at BASF, said, “As a research driven agricultural company, we want to use the full potential of digitalization 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.”  

“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,” commented Delair’s Agriculture and Forestry product manager, Lénaïc Grignard. “We are honored 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,” she added.  

BASF has recently come up with multispectral sensor-equipped drones, which has the feature to automate and optimize the field data collection. These drones further allow real-time insights into how plants respond to environmental conditions. With delair.ai, BASF will work towards building digital twins of their research fields, and mapping and analyzing hectares of plots across all trial sites. The platform will allow field agronomists to automatically vectorize as well as geo-reference microplots and generate biological data and crop behavior per plot.