b'PARTNER CONTENTData Science Drives Seed BreedingD riving decisions through data and analytics is the currentrange of scenarios. The Climate FieldView platform is a key part buzz in the agricultural industry, and that buzz has com- in taking insights from data collected during breeding and field panies racing to develop digital platforms that will enabletesting and turning those insights into value for farmers. farmers to make decisions based on multiple layers of farm data.At Bayer, we are using analytics to understand the genetics When Bayer acquired Monsanto Company, it inherited a seedin our pipelines and how they react to various environments at a breeding program that had already embraced data science as alevel of detail and scale that has never been seen before, said Slo-way to accelerate germplasm evaluation and testing.bodan Trifunovic, head of fechnology deployment. We already Plant breeding is a nuanced and complex process that be- collect, analyze and store billions of data points needed for our comes increasingly complex as more and more variables and databreeders to understand the products we are bringing to market. are used to more closely target seed breeding to customers needs,Today, with the Climate FieldView platform, we can take that data said Anthony Kovacs, data science lead.and create value for farmers by delivering better recommenda-At Bayer, we have been able to mathematically and computa- tions and management advice for the products they are planting tionally model the processes that drive genetic inheritance andin their own fields.the dynamics of our breeding pipelines, Kovacs said. This, inData science has already enhanced seed breeding, and it will turn, has allowed us to harness the incredible progress that hascontinue to do so. It has helped create a future in which acre-by-been made in the fields of data analytics and artificial intelligenceacre tailored solutions are a reality. This is the future in which to profoundly impact our seed breeding operations. farmers make decisions that are augmented by analytics, relating Becoming an industry-leading seed provider of high-perform- data from thousands of testing fields to their own fields and crops. ing genetics, has, historically, required significant investments ofThis future is closer than you think, and Bayer Crop Science is time, manpower, land and resources. Specifically, breeders had toleading the way.establish large-scale growing experiments to observe and evalu-ate how new breeding crosses perform. Prior to the incorporation of data science, this work resulted in volumes of data that had to be collected, stored and sorted through manually.Today, cloud computing and modern field technology have allowed Bayers breeders to collect a staggering amount of data from hundreds of thousands of individual genetic combina-tions across hundreds of environments and growing scenarios to enhance and speed up the selection of high-performing seeds for commercialization in its three brands, DEKALB, Deltapine and Asgrow. While in the past breeders may have been limited to setting up, monitoring and collecting data from experiments that targeted just a portion of a large maturity zone, today they are able to tap into machine learning and artificial intelligence to set up, monitor and collect data points from experiments spanning entire maturity zones and regions. While talented breeders, researchers and technical staff con-tinue to be essential parts of our breeding pipeline, the collection and screening of those thousands of data points is much more efficient today, said Kovacs. Data science is helping drive the accelerating pace of new, better-performing varieties and hybrids being introduced into the market.Today breeders are able to Because more data is being efficiently collected and screenedtap into machine learning on every product, it has become possible to make recommenda- and artificial intelligence to tions that are more closely tailored to specific farm conditionsset up, monitor and collect based on in-depth analyses of product performance in a diversedata points from experiments spanning entire maturity zones and regions. FEBRUARY 2020SEEDWORLD.COM /17'