Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, announced it has expanded its existing commercial partnership with BASF Digital Farming GmbH. Through this strategic partnership, BASF Digital Farming is growing its use of Planet satellite data products to power its advanced digital farming products and services from its xarvio® Digital Farming Solutions brand.
Planet owns and operates the world’s largest constellation of Earth observation imaging satellites, providing near-daily data and insights regarding global patterns of environmental and industrial change. With demand for food supply steadily increasing, companies are looking to move towards more sustainable and efficient farming solutions. Working with Planet, BASF has embraced the digital agriculture revolution, building new solutions and services to increase sustainability, both economically and environmentally, for growers.
“We are in a critical time for sustainable agriculture. High-cadence satellite data can provide revolutionary solutions to advance precision farming, yield estimation, and seed selection,” said Will Marshall, Planet Co-founder and CEO. “By expanding this strategic partnership with BASF, a global leader in the digital farming industry, we look forward to powering novel and effective tools to enable growers to get the best crop yields in the most sustainable and efficient ways.”
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Through this partnership, BASF is expanding its use of Planet’s Crop Biomass Planetary Variable product, a cloud-free, analysis-ready data feed, combining radar and optical signals to help agronomists and farmers better understand the status of their fields, enabling more efficient and targeted use of crop inputs to optimize production. BASF is also increasing its use of Planet’s monitoring data product, PlanetScope, which provides near-daily imagery of all agricultural fields around the world at 3.5 m resolution, complementing the insights from Crop Biomass by providing high-cadence imagery for small fields.
The combination of Planet’s two data sources provides the highest level of operational reliability for BASF Digital Farming’s xarvio® FIELD MANAGER, an advanced crop optimization platform that delivers independent, timely, field and sub-field agronomic advice to optimize yield and profitability for more than 100,000 registered users worldwide. For BASF, global operational reliability is critical, with swiftness and stability required to support crop production on millions of hectares across multiple continents daily.
“At BASF Digital Farming, our focus is on providing farmers and advisors with innovative products and services from xarvio that make crop production more efficient, profitable, and sustainable. Using Planet’s satellite data and Planetary Variable products we can continue to deliver measurable benefits, and through the expanded partnership we can scale that impact,” said Dr. Thomas Schilling, Managing Director and Global Head of Platform Engineering, BASF Digital Farming.
BASF leverages Planet’s satellite data and services to also provide insights and recommendations during the growing season including variable rate seeding, variable rate fertilizer, and variable rate fungicide use for a range of crops including wheat, soy, corn, cotton, and rice. Analytics derived from Planet’s near-daily imagery have enabled BASF to support growers to sustain expected yields, while making more efficient use of crop protection products since 2020.
SOURCE: Businesswire