Case Study: Bayer (The Climate Corporation) achieves better predictive agronomy and soil-data access with Wazoku

How the digital farming arm of Bayer used open innovation to better leverage data and improve farming across Europe and South Africa

The Climate Corporation, the digital farming arm of Bayer Crop Science, faced a data challenge: to build predictive agronomic models that help farmers “farm smarter,” they needed georeferenced soil and elevation data across 10 countries in Europe and South Africa — information that was difficult to locate or assemble internally. To fill this gap they ran an open-innovation Challenge with Wazoku, inviting outside experts to source and integrate the diverse datasets required for field- and subfield-scale modeling.

Using the Wazoku platform, the Crowd submitted 19 solutions from 43 countries (1,862 pageviews to the Challenge), and a $10,000 award was split between two winners. The delivered datasets and methods can be used to train future agronomic models and be integrated into farmer-facing tools across Europe and South Africa, solving the information gap faster and more cost-effectively than internal approaches.

Bayer

Phil Taylor

Director of Open Innovation and Outreach