Enhancing Smart Farming Solutions from Space
Planet and BASF Digital Farming Expand Strategic Partnership
An existing partnership between Planet Labs and BASF Digital Farming has been expanded, allowing BASF to grow its use of Planet satellite data products to power its advanced digital farming products and services from its xarvio Digital Farming Solutions brand.
“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.”
Will Marshall, Planet
Planet owns and operates a 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.”
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.