Ghent University and Bayer partner to improve soil health on farms
EUrope
July 19, 2016
To improve agriculture in Europe sometimes you have to reach out and touch someone. From 29 June to 1 July 2016, agriculture and life sciences company Bayer put on its annual Forward Farming event, on a farm just outside Brussels in Belgium, to showcase a plethora of digital farm practices and technologies to invited guests. One was a joint university and Bayer project to scan the soil with digital tools to help a farmer work more efficiently and ecologically.
This two-minute video shows how precision farming helps farmer Jacob farm better and more ecologically in the Netherlands.
To be clear this story has nothing to do with the fact Bayer is trying to buy us. Monsanto also sees a future in precision farming as supported by our investment in the Climate Corporation back in 2013 and our DEKALB® Technology Centres throughout Europe. We just thought this sort of joint academic and industry partnership is a progressive way forward for agriculture and we enjoyed spending a day learning how Bayer does it. The fact is a cooperative approach has end users in mind: partnering cutting-edge research with industry resources offers net benefits for farmers, consumers and the environment alike.
A cooperative approach that has end users in mind will result in net benefits for farmers, consumers and the environment. “Some of the fundamental science behind [the work] has been discovered more than a decade ago. Now we just need to apply it,” said Nathan de Geyter, innovation manager at Ghent university.
Agricultural science at Ghent university has both long term and short term goals, from soil science on farms to understanding how to grow plants in space.
The Forward Farming Model: This approach brings the partnership between farmers, crops, farming machinery and environment closer together. The outer circle represents external sensors and drones; the middle circle shows the field operations of tractors; and the inner circle represents the farmer’s data and management. Image courtesy Ghent university.
Nathan said his team uses an applied socio-economic approach to bring direct value to society. This value can be social, economic or environmental; preferably all three at once. For example, the biggest difference in conventional farming and precision farming is a more intimate interaction between the farmer, machines, crops and the environment, with the later.
“Bayer provides the means and also in this case access to a commercial farm, but the university still does the research in a completely independent way, while retaining the rights to publish all the findings,” said Nathan.
In precision – or smart – farming the biggest question for a farmer is what technology, software or data can help him. The first thing that the Ghent university team does is visit a farm and conduct an interview to understand the farmer’s expectations. Then they decide which sensor to use and at what resolution, depth etc. Say a soil scan of the farm is decided upon to understand the soil’s texture; as a result of this soil map a farmer could invest in software to manage the farm’s data more precisely or use precision irrigation machinery to use less water.
This soil map divides a farmer’s field into specific areas. So instead of a one-size-fits-all approach a farmer could set his machines to work with a ‘helicopter-view’ to better manage the farm in zones. More water could be irrigated on the field’s driest zones and less water in the wetter zones.
“If we meet a certain stakeholder where there is a big overlap in interest, be it in the science we do or in the value for society we want to create, we set up a more extensive collaboration,” said Nathan.
“Researchers, policymakers, industrial players and farmers need to work together to change the way conventional farming is done.”
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