The following report is from AgFunder News:
We’ve all seen those announcements before: Company X ‘partners’ with Amazon or Microsoft to ‘enhance’ their digital capabilities.
Translation: Company X is now an Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure customer – ie, they’re using the tech giants’ processing power for their digital platforms. Not exactly news, which usually means a pass for AFN.
When Bayer reached out this week with details of a new deal with Microsoft Azure, my immediate reaction was that it was something similar in support of its farm data product, Climate’s FieldView. But reading the initial press release, it looked like this could have a broader impact on the agtech industry, significant ramifications for ag data more broadly, and be a major new revenue stream for both Bayer and Microsoft.
According to the release, the organisations are building “a new cloud-based set of digital tools and data science solutions for use in agriculture and adjacent industries, bringing new infrastructure and foundational capabilities to accelerate innovation, boost efficiency, and support sustainability across value chains.”
This new “off-the-shelf infrastructure” could be licensed by startups as well as large, global enterprises, for use in their own “farming operations, sustainable sourcing, manufacturing and supply chain improvement, and ESG monitoring and measurement” offerings, the companies said.
Foundational Tools For The Industry
To understand what this means exactly, I set up a call with Bayer’s new head of digital farming solutions Jeremy Williams, who, eight months into his new role, told me he had inherited this deal with Microsoft, which has been some time in the making.
According to Williams, it’s much more than a case of Bayer white-labeling Microsoft Azure’s processing capabilities; the two organisations are going one-step further to create a cloud infrastructure that’s not just storage but provides “foundational” digital ag tools for clients to license. Combining “assets Microsoft and Bayer have individually” they’re building “from scratch” a platform that can save individual companies, developers, and entrepreneurs from reinventing the wheel, he told me, somewhat vaguely. The platform will include foundational data science capabilities such as ingesting and processing satellite imagery, he exampled.
Imagine you are a company that’s contracting commodities from growers and you want to help them track their practices better; instead of building that software internally, you can leverage this set of tools to do things like that. What’s exciting is that this will be useful not just for bigger enterprises, but for agtech entrepreneurs too who, instead of investing in core digital capabilities, can focus on differentiating their products instead.
There’s a tremendous amount of data generated in agriculture and adjacent industries but it’s often disconnected, incomplete and with many errors; lots of work has to go into processing and harnessing it to turn it into useful information for customers. We believe that not everyone needs to spend their resources doing that foundational work; we can allow companies large or small to focus on the things that are strategically important for them, while they rely on us for their core capabilities.
Of course, Bayer will also be able to use the new infrastructure to the benefit of FieldView and Williams referenced the premium insights it will be able to offer its users. But it looks like Bayer, and Microsoft to some extent, are viewing this as a new business and revenue stream; a Bayer spokesperson said that “Microsoft will activate its global sales force and consulting team—focused on promoting platform solutions and services—to sell the platform to an active customer pipeline.”
While Williams said it was too early to go into too much detail, “components of the model” will involve a revenue share between the two companies as they license the infrastructure and capabilities to third parties.
We look forward to partnering with Bayer to accelerate their transformation and then offering those some capabilities to customers, ISVs, startups, and enterprises in the agriculture industry and beyond. Microsoft has a well-established partner business model, and we will leverage a better-together co-selling approach with Bayer to reach companies on a global scale.
A Microsoft spokesperson said
What’s The Significance?
I’m still in the process of asking around what the industry thinks the significance of this is. Some said it was not much more than a typical processing deal as illustrated above; others that it was a trumped-up way of attracting more ag companies to Microsoft’s Azure services and agtech developers to connect with FieldView. But some said the partnership could demonstrably support the entire industry.
I’m still in the process of asking around what the industry thinks the significance of this is. Some said it was not much more than a typical processing deal as illustrated above; others that it was a trumped-up way of attracting more ag companies to Microsoft’s Azure services and agtech developers to connect with FieldView. But some said the partnership could demonstrably support the entire industry.
Will Wells, founder of Hummingbird Technologies, the remote sensing and AI platform for regenerative ag, said the deal could be a “game-changer” and that the partnership could build something “really powerful.” Wells talked about how Hummingbird and others will have spent millions of dollars over the years on ingesting, processing, storing, and then analysing very large datasets combining weather, imagery, and more. Just one example of a service Hummingbird offers — identifying deforestation in Brazil — involves terabytes of data, he exampled.
A cloud platform like Azure to partner with a data platform like Bayer’s Climate could potentially do all the leg work for customers or downstream analytics companies and save a lot of the hassles of engineering, but, more importantly, save them huge costs.
Tech companies and startups then just need to focus on building their predictive models and algorithms to analyse that data for clients, he added.
So what’s the end goal for Bayer — and Microsoft — with this partnership? Could Bayer finally start to make direct revenues from its big digital investment that’s arguably cost it all those billions it’s had to pay for glyphosate lawsuits in recent years after its acquisition of Monsanto (and with it, The Climate Corporation and FieldView)?
Williams described Bayer’s “digital farming” platform as having three core ways of creating value – i.e. making money – for Bayer.
- By providing insights and transparency around how clients are using Bayer’s “physical products” — its seeds, chemicals and inputs — and their farming operations, Bayer can better position and sell those products by making more relevant recommendations and so on. Since it was always so hard to make money out of FieldView on a subscription basis, this was always how I understood Monsanto and later Bayer to measure the value of their digital investment, until more recently.
- By creating new business models for Bayer. Over the last two to three years, Bayer has started using the digital platform to visualize and build new business models around outcome-based, risk-sharing with customers. This is where farmers pay Bayer to guarantee them a certain yield, if they follow specific guidelines based on digital recommendations and predictions, instead of just paying for a product without any assurances. Incentivising practices that can help to sequester or carbon storage would fit here too. “It’s presented new ways of interacting with our customers and is another way we see digital bringing value to us as a company,” said Williams. BASF indicated its Xarvio digital platform was tuned for just this in 2019.
- By licensing digital capabilities through this partnership with Microsoft. FieldView currently has 70 platform partners but Williams believes this new platform with Microsoft will expand the ecosystem even more.
Meta Of Agriculture?
But perhaps the biggest question is what a combined effort on agricultural data between this tech behemoth and agriculture giant looks like longer-term?
I wonder what percentage of the ag data universe is now flowing through that monolithic combined platform? It sounds a little bit like the Meta (previously Facebook) of agriculture.
Asked Wells.
FieldView is the world’s largest digital ag platform, currently used on more than 180 million farming acres across more than 20 countries. Microsoft also has a large footprint in agriculture through FarmBeats, a partnership with Land O’Lakes, and more broadly if you look at related entities like the Gates Foundation and other Gates-backed investment vehicles. That’s a lot of agricultural data.
Data ownership and privacy is a continued theme in agriculture, and there are longstanding concerns about the amounts of data owned by large enterprises in the industry, especially Bayer. Microsoft declined to comment about what data sources it will be bringing to bear in this partnership, or how the tech giant views the significance of this partnership internally. Williams said that all data used on the platform will be provided by the customers — in the case of FieldView, that’s the farmers and he emphasised the private nature of that data.
Bayer officials told Successful Farming that the partnership “does not and will not change Bayer’s or FieldView’s privacy statement or commitment to stewarding customer data” and that the company will not share customer farm data with third parties like Microsoft without consent.
Microsoft has built a trusted cloud solution with millions of customers around the world across multiple industries – including healthcare, financial services and retail. Their approach to data security and compliance aligns with Bayer’s, and FieldView remains compliant with all regional data privacy and data storage regulations.
Said a Bayer spokesperson
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Big tech and big pharma working with Big ag, what a “shock!”
One must look past all the flowerly language, and look deeper at the real sinister goals at play – thing The WinePress have reported on many times now.
These are important issues at hand, but these types never get a whole lot of views. Typical fickle Americans and those abroad, who are willingly ignorant of the tyranny, and then whine about it when it’s far too late.
How The Antichrist Metaverse Will Control People’s Senses And Brain Functions
Agenda Absolute Zero: You’ll Be Enslaved And Be Happy
Warning: Entire Swaths Of American Farmland Is Being Confiscated To Install New “Carbon Pipelines”
Apeel Sciences Purchases ImpactVision To Utilize Technology To See Inside Foods
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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Figured you might like this… I wonder why they retracted this article blowing the lid on quite a few things, with plenty of sources to back it up…
“Deceptology in cancer and vaccine sciences: Seeds of immune destruction‐mini electric shocks in mitochondria: Neuroplasticity‐electrobiology of response profiles and increased induced diseases in four generations – A hypothesis”
Mahin Khatami
Here’s a bit of what’s in it…
“From Rockefeller’s support of patent medicine to Gates’ patent vaccines, medical establishment invested a great deal in intellectual ignorance. Through the control over medical education and research it has created a public illusion to prop up corporate profit and encouraged the lust for money and power. An overview of data on cancer and vaccine sciences, the status of Americans’ health, a survey of repeated failed projects, economic toxicity, and heavy drug consumption or addiction among young and old provide compelling evidence that in the twentieth century nearly all classic disease categories (congenital, inheritance, neonatal, or induced) shifted to increase induced diseases. Examples of this deceptology in ignoring or minimizing, and mocking fundamental discoveries and theories in cancer and vaccine sciences are attacks on research showing that (a), effective immunity is responsible for defending and killing pathogens and defective cancerous cells, correcting and repairing genetic mutations; (b) viruses cause cancer; and (c), abnormal gene mutations are often the consequences of (and secondary to) disturbances in effective immunity. The outcomes of cancer reductionist approaches to therapies reveal failure rates of 90% (+/‐5) for solid tumors; loss of over 50 million lives and waste of $30‐50 trillions on too many worthless, out‐of‐focus, and irresponsible projects…”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7749544/?report=reader
And here’s another article published a while ago in a different medical journal of hers (link below)
“Safety concerns and hidden agenda behind HPV vaccines: another generation of drug-dependent society?”
Mahin Khatami
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40169-016-0126-1
And among Dr. Mahin Khatami’s many impressive credentials,
“In 1998, at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), she was a Program Director and health scientist administrator, involved in developing molecular concepts for utilization of patient biospecimen for large clinical trials such as Prostate-Lung-Colorectal Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trials.”
https://vaccineimpact.com/2016/hpv-vaccine-scam-nih-scientist-exposes-corruption-in-cancer-and-vaccine-industries/
I haven’t finished reading them, but when I get time…
Fickle willingly ignorant Americans too busy going to church buildings and then when “worship” is over, let’s go to Applebee’s or Fuddruckers and then sit in front of the idiot box or video games and further decay our brains-I came out of that life, Jacob and readers, dead empty religion followed by going out to the restaurants and then I’d either do homework or play video games (I’ll admit my faults, too) while grandma sat in front of that confounded TV and turn her brain to mashed potatoes. I’d rather play with live cobras than go back to that so-called life, it was empty, it was depressing, and it was lukewarm!
Sifted words. All these words are to their benefit (big corporations), and to our massive disadvantage as regular working-class people:
“Broader impact”
“Significant ramifications”
“Major new revenue stream”
“track their practices”
“bigger enterprises”
“Data ownership and privacy”
“data owned by large enterprises”
Corporatist monopoly writ large, & we know who the losers to that always are. ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about that’….’just run off & do something fun.’ and….’Leave the driving to us.’ We make money from your ‘fun’, ‘taking care’ of the consequences, and merchandising you cradle to grave down to your every breath and genetic molecule. My, Revelation 18 is accurate to the smallest detail.
Probably goes without saying: but in the meantime, little co-op, barter; family & community based & serving, outside the system til the Rapture food production, preservation & provision need to steer clear of those ‘helps’ mining date for steering set-ups bringing ruinous advice & help, and eliminating competition. 2 Corinthians 11 seduction.
They can do a lot with satellite & surveillance outside of that, but we should at least make ’em work for it.
If we become more diligent than they are, maybe slothfulness would grow in them. Problem is, most of us have been accustomed to laziness (conveniences).
A few, “insignificant”, born again Christians living in remote places, who learn to depend less and less on their technology and “help”, it’s possible that they wouldn’t be too keen on using up their resources to monitor us. But in the cities it’s easy for them, like fishing out of a barrel.