DELAIR and BASF Partner to Advance Agricultural Research with Drone Data

“It is important for startups to pursue their business, given the current global situation,” writes Delair’s Laurence Collet.  We couldn’t agree more.  In a far from normal environment, business still continue to form partnerships that will drive both the drone industry and other sectors forward, contributing to innovative solutions for the problems the world faces.

This week, French drone data services company Delair announced a major contract with German agricultural solutions firm BASF.  “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,” Collet writes.

While precision agriculture was among the first major verticals for the drone industry, as services mature the vertical has continued to expand.  Regulations enabling flight beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) have made drones more useful for larger agricultural operations, and better data processing has enabled more applications.  With this partnership, Delair will support BASF research projects worldwide, giving scientists access to data that could significantly advance innovations in agriculture.

The following is a Delair press release.

Limburgerhof, Germany, and Toulouse, France, March 17, 2020 – BASF and Delair, a global provider of end-to-end visual data management solutions for enterprises, today announced their collaboration 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 standardize 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 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,” said 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 optimize 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 analyze hectares of plots across all trial sites. The cloud platform will enable field agronomists to automatically vectorize as well as geo-reference microplots and generate biological data and crop behavior 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 Lénaïc Grignard, Agriculture and Forestry product manager at Delair. “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.”