Bayer as a committed partner of sustainable agriculture aims to drive a digital development for a competitive and sustainable agriculture in Vietnam.
By nature, agriculture utilities other natural resources such as water, land and the soil. While operation is increasing, available land is decreasing. In this context, sustainability is very important. At global level, demand for food will increase by 50 percent and yields may decline by up to 30 percent by 2050 in the absence of ambitious climate action. A more resilient food future will rely on sharp increases in agricultural R&D, which has demonstrated benefit-cost ratios between 2:1 and 17:1; better alignment of government finance and incentives for farmers with long-term, sustainable, climate-smart production; and a step change in access to information, innovative technologies, and finance to enhance the resilience of 500 million small-scale farming households whose livelihoods are most critically impacted by climate change.
In Asia particularly, the majority of farmers including Vietnam are smallholders who have less than one or two hectares accounting for 70% of the consumption of agricultural production. Bayer’s ambitions to bring digital solutions to enhance smallholder farmers’ technical capabilities with digital advisory to optimize their cultivation method and overcome climate challenges and disease/pest stress to achieve higher yield, quality, and profit. With that, the company enables small-holder farmers to increase agricultural productivity in a sustainable manner and to improve the lives of their families and communities as well as making their contribution to keeping Vietnam’s agriculture competitive in international markets.
Bayer aims to drive a digital development for a competitive and sustainable agriculture in Vietnam
“It is clearly that our digital solutions, have offered great opportunities to accelerate the sustainability in agriculture. It is a critical agenda of Bayer to help smallholder farmers to produce more with less resources,” said Kohei Sakata, Customer Experience and Digital Strategy Head for Asia Pacific Region, Bayer Crop Science. “Our innovative digital solutions will help to enable a high quality and safety farming practice in a very productive manner.”
Among digital solutions, drone, as a flying aerial machine, can help smallholder farmers to prevent from chemical hazard. The drone can just spray to the field with crop protection products and that could prevent the farmers from operate under exposure of chemical. This will also ensure a very correct spray to the field, helping avoiding the overuse or disuse of chemical products. In addition, drone can also contribute to water consumption saving because it uses very limited of valuable water. Last but not least, drone does not only require much money to control but also can be a great solution for the labor shortage. Now in many countries, including developing countries, farmers are struggling to secure the labor to do all the farm operation works but drone and the mechanization can help farmers to produce the products with more efficiency and less labor.
Bayer Digital Ag Display
In Vietnam, within the framework of cooperation of Rice Value Chain program between Bayer and Trung An, Bayer signed an exclusive strategic cooperation agreement with Trung An to jointly promote the local application of agriculture unmanned aerial systems and provide customized plant protection service to help improve cultivation capacity and control residues in high quality rice production, targeting the export market. Initially, the pilot project has been implemented in Trung An’s farm in Kien Giang province for two years since May 2019 on 200 hectares out of total 800 hectares.
Another solution of Bayer includes a trait and bioscience technology to make seed tolerance against pest attack, for example Fall Army Worm (FAW) in corn. FAW is now a threat over the world including Vietnam, significantly reducing the corn yield. Bayer has a trait and bioscience technology to make seed tolerance against these pet attack together with the company’s chemical solutions to protect plants from those attacks. Thanks to those technologies and solutions of Bayer, farmers can not only protect the yields but also their livelihood.
Apart from that, Bayer is working on a joint project with and key stakeholders to accompany the Vietnam sustainable agricultural development. The activity outline includes (1) increasing farmers’ capabilities and (2) application of high-technology in digital farming, targeting at crops favored for exportation to EU markets to support the coming EVFTA implementation for agricultural sector covering coffee, pepper, rice and fruits.
Mr Kohei Sakata, Customer Experience and Digital Strategy Head for Asia Pacific Region, Bayer Crop Science at “Vietnam-EU Forum on Sustainable Agriculture – Agriculture 4.0: Key to the European Market”
“As a world leading agriculture company, Bayer has the global mission to set a standard in sustainability. With our innovation and digital solutions, we aim to making agriculture or farming itself much more professional and efficient, and also more attractive to the younger generation. Thanks to new technologies available now, we believe that we can really help to support the generation changes in agriculture to enable a more sustainable food supply chain to feed the growing world population,” added Kohei.
In order for Bayer and other innovation-oriented companies to ensure timely introduction of digital farming technologies, infrastructure development and predictable and internationally harmonized regulatory environment would be key factors. Bayer would like to take partnership approach to collaborate with all public and private stakeholders to jointly accelerate these prioritized areas.
About Bayer
Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. Its products and services are designed to benefit people by supporting efforts to overcome the major challenges presented by a growing and aging global population. At the same time, the Group aims to increase its earning power and create value through innovation and growth. Bayer is committed to the principles of sustainable development, and the Bayer brand stands for trust, reliability and quality throughout the world. In fiscal 2018, the Group employed around 117,000 people and had sales of 39.6 billion euros. Capital expenditures amounted to 2.6 billion euros, R&D expenses to 5.2 billion euros. For more information, go to www.bayer.com.
