82 / SEEDWORLD.COM JANUARY 2019 To advance in these three areas, USAID has formed an ad hoc working group comprised of companies from the seed community. A few of these include Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva AgriScience and KWS. “This links to the sustainable development goal to achieve zero hunger by 2030,” Bertram says. “Our goal is for the world’s smallholder farmers and the poor farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to benefit from the kind of qual- ity breeding and to have the products available to them that farmers in developed parts of the world take for granted. “We are very grateful for your help and support. It’s certainly not the answer to hunger but without it, we aren’t going to achieve the goal of ending hunger in our lifetime.” Harnessing Digital Tools Using digital tools and the technology available is also a focus for farmers in North America, and a panel of experts shared their vision for the future of digital agriculture at the meeting. The panel included: Brian Lutz of The Climate Corporation, Chris Seifert of Granular, Mark Herrmann of Ag Reliant Genetics and Scott Beck of Beck’s Superior Hybrids. Today, the amount of data that’s collected on a farm in a single day is less than 500,000 data points per day — that’s still quite a bit. If you go out 15 years, it’s going to be 10 times that amount, said one of the panelists. What is the next age of agriculture? “The next age is a real shift. It deals with auton- omous equipment, robotic sensors, the internet of things and the connectivity to provide real-time adaptive applications,” Beck said, adding that there are two types of data that will be used — historical data and real-time data. He explained that farmers will be using his- torical data (soil type, soil tests, yield) to make long-term decisions and real-time data to make short-term decisions. During the panel Lutz shared that Climate Corporation’s Field View uses all this data to help place seed on farmers’ acres through modeling. In 2017, with in-field strip trials, he said they earned 80 percent of one farmer’s acres and in 2018 on average saw a 6-bushel-per-acre yield increase with the varieties selected by the model recom- mendations. These types of results, Lutz shared, have continued in 2018. “Everything is shaped by or dictated by what we understand performance to be,” he said. “We only bring a new product into this world if we think that it’s going to perform well and deliver value. But our understanding of performance has always been incomplete. “Everything is shaped by or dictated by what we understand performance to be ... But our understanding of performance has always been incomplete.” — Brian Lutz “No matter how much R&D and plug data we invest in collecting, it will never represent the totality of the environment across which growers are actually planting their own products. As we get unprecedented volumes of data and new insights into real-world performance, it really has the opportunity for us to shape the products that we advance and launch into the marketplace in ways that we’ve never been able to before.” Beck asked: “What if we could get a disease score on every plant in a plot using drones or robotics? Could technology give us an unbiased score?” He said scientists are close but work still needs to be done to perfect the technology. To sum it up, Beck said it’s really all about con- trol, the ability to control the timing of everything from planting to application to harvest to get the very best results. SW During a session focusing on the future of digital agriculture, Scott Beck of Beck’s Superior Hybrids said all the technology and data really comes down to control. WHERE ON THE WEB To check out our video interviews from ASTA’s CSS 2018 & Seed Expo, visit SeedWorld.com/videos.