Bayer collaboration with Microsoft connects farm data

Bayer announced an update on the strategic collaboration with Microsoft: New data connectors allow secure, compliant exchange of farm data between Bayer’s flagship digital farming product Climate FieldView™ and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) through the industry platform Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Following the preview launch of Bayer AgPowered Services on the platform earlier this year, Leaf Agriculture is now bringing a solution to further enhance accessibility of farm machinery data, and OneSoil is delivering new solutions for in-season crop identification.

Once initiated by a farmer, enterprise customers from across the agri-food value chain, such as retailers, financial institutions, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies can now connect and auto sync planting, application, and harvest activity files from FieldView, enabling the exchange of data between solutions built on Azure Data Manager.

Lack of data interoperability

One of agriculture’s biggest technology challenges is a lack of data interoperability. Farmers have seen advancements in the ability to connect data between on-farm platforms, but solutions allowing them to connect to services and opportunities beyond the farm have been largely unavailable. Companies and organizations supporting agriculture and related industries have also lacked the infrastructure and capabilities needed to best serve their customers.

Along with FieldView and OEM connectivity, a new AgPowered Service further enhances the accessibility of farm machinery data. Bayer Farm Machinery Decoder powered by Leaf Agriculture can translate machine data from many different OEMs and platforms. This can accelerate innovation and improve solution delivery to farmers by making it easier to build with consistent data from multiple sources.

Ready-to-use capabilities

As announced already in 2021 and earlier this year, AgPowered Services from Bayer in combination with Azure Data Manager provide ready-to-use capabilities available for businesses and organizations from start-ups to global enterprises to license and use for their own internal or customer-facing digital solutions.

For example, companies that develop on-farm technologies can build on the new cloud infrastructure and core capabilities from Microsoft (Azure Data Manager) and license additional capabilities from Bayer (AgPowered Services) to build digital tools that support favorable agronomic outcomes for growers. Similarly, consumer goods companies can use the cloud offerings to build solutions that provide insight into nutrients, sustainability, and production practices to build trust with consumers, stakeholders and investors.