BASF makes big strides in digital farming with AWS Cloud
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Highlights
- Germany-based multinational chemical company BASF teamed up with TCS and AWS Cloud to help farmers use digital technology to achieve sustainable farming.
- Looking for solutions to better serve farmers, BASF moved its data operations to AWS Cloud.
- The move allowed the company to make the most of its digital farming solution xarvio® and advanced AI technologies to deliver more accurate crop-related insights.
In this article
Challenge
Enabling farmers to make smarter decisions
The largest chemical producer in the world, Germany’s BASF helps farmers get innovative. ASF focuses on sustainable approach to help them use digital technology to make more informed decisions.
BASF had developed xarvio®—a digital farming solution to help monitor weather and identify problems like crop disease and pest presence in fields. Using real-time field photos and field monitoring, farmers can instantly receive information about their crops, optimize protection, and improve their bottom line.
To better serve the agricultural industry, BASF wanted to tap deeper into the power of automated data management and cloud with xarvio®. The goal: a central, secure cloud-based repository from where stakeholders could safely and quickly access different types of data. Leveraging advanced AI technologies, the data can then be used for automated weed identification, disease recognition, leaf damage identification, pest monitoring and crop emergence analysis (counting of the number of plants that have emerged within a one square meter area).
Solution
Boosting farm productivity with cloud, AI, and analytics
BASF, along with TCS and AWS, jointly designed and developed a cloud-based data approach for faster crop insights.
The AWS-powered solution helped BASF roll out highly accurate agronomical models for precise image classification. This solution can automatically query field data for weed identification, disease recognition, leaf damage check, and pest monitoring. The tool can also quickly tabulate nitrogen status data—an important marker of plant health—and perform emergence analysis.
Artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with machine learning (ML) and improved data operations, enhances xarvio’s ability to easily analyze various data streams. The cloud-based data platform also combines analytical tools to provide intuitive, descriptive, operational and historical data visualization.
The approach uses Amazon DocumentDB on AWS to ingest thousands of daily images into Amazon S3 storage buckets. The ingested data is then divided into formats that provide end users with a treasure trove of agricultural insights. TCS helped to configure a data search engine with Amazon Elasticsearch that enables users to gain field-related insights.
Benefits
Proactive crop health support to farmers
With the suggested approach, BASF is enabling farmers to improve crop health and boost yield and profit. Thanks to it, BASF is also contributing to solving the food challenge for the world's growing population, sustainably.
Data lake scaled operations to millions of data records.
Real-time notifications to farmers on the health of their crops, weather, and more.
Data services and more accurate AI-ML models for precision agronomic diagnostics help farmers take timely action.
Farming-related recommendations are delivered in real time.
Visualizations based on images, geo-location and meta data help in better interpreting insights from data to farmers.
Improved performance of querying and searching statistical data, resulted in real-time building of crop solutions
What the client says
xarvio® has created real-time farming insights at scale by combining AI, data operations and analytics on AWS Cloud.
