Leading biotechnology company Bayer’s Crop Science division has announced the pilot of an expert large language model (LLM) system to benefit farmers and up-level agronomists in their daily work.
The LLM contains centuries of aggregated experience from Bayer agronomists from around the world, resulting in an expert system that can quickly and accurately answer questions related to agronomy, farm management and Bayer agricultural products. Instead of a time-consuming process, the intuitive system responds to natural language and can generate expert information within seconds.
“Our unique GenAI system has the potential to serve agronomists and benefit farmers all over the world, further advancing AI as an indispensable technology for agriculture,” says Amanda McClerren, CIO and Head of Digital Transformation & Information Technology for Bayer’s Crop Science division. “We’ll continue to use traditional AI to develop better products, and we’re also committed to harnessing new GenAI technology in a thoughtful way that augments and supports knowledgeable experts across the industry, bringing value to farmers and those who serve them.”
Developed in collaboration with Microsoft as the leading technology partner and Ernst & Young (EY) as an industry partner, Bayer hopes to integrate the expert GenAI system into its digital offerings, and the company anticipates broad opportunities for collaboration with other agricultural offerings and partners. The tool has been designed as a global capability, and looks to benefit millions of smallholder farmers in the future by democratising access to agronomic advice and product information critical to feeding communities and improving global food security.
“AI and automation are helping farms of all sizes produce more while using fewer natural resources, and we’re starting to see how they can enhance decision-making on almost any plot of land,” says Ranveer Chandra, Managing Director, Research for Industry & CTO, Agri-Food at Microsoft. “With Bayer’s strengths in data science, digital, and especially agronomic expertise, we’re pleased to be contributing to an expert system that will make agronomic understanding more accessible and empower those responsible for feeding the planet.”
Looking ahead, Bayer aims to expand the pilot of the expert GenAI system to selected agronomists and potentially farmers as early as this year, while continuing to advance a separate GenAI prototype allowing users to directly query their own farm data. Because they also pull insights from closed data sets, these GenAI tools are unique for agriculture and will bring more meaningful value to farmers, agronomists and other industry users, compared to out-of-the-box LLMs that only use open-source data.
The company also hopes to bring new cloud technologies to the agri-food industry with its ‘AgPowered services.’ This includes Bayer Historical Weather, a comprehensive weather dataset that spans the last 40 years and provides detailed, field-level weather insights across global agricultural regions. This can inform weather risk assessments and actuary processes, and will be used to forecast crop seasonality and production changes year over year, as well as train agronomic models.
“Whether you are a farmer using digital tools or a company that operates downstream, you need technologies that can help your business adapt to a changing landscape,” says Jeremy Williams, Head of Digital Farming for Bayer’s Crop Science division. “With our AgPowered Services, we are making access to digital tools easy and convenient, benefiting the industry and driving innovation. There is both a tremendous opportunity and a pressing need for digital technology to better serve farmers and the industry, and we aim to achieve this by enabling the cloud-connected acre.”
Under industry preview, the cloud offerings from Bayer and Microsoft will make it possible for organisations to access ready-made capabilities and build on top of a robust digital infrastructure, instead of developing from scratch. This reduces the time to market for new capabilities, delivering increased opportunities for farmers and value chain customers.
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Source: Bayer
