Corteva is leveraging decision science, driving farmer and R&D productivity
Partnering with Farmers to Drive Productivity through Decision Science
Brian Lutz, Ph.D., Vice President, Agricultural Solutions, Corteva Agriscience
The word ‘digital’ has come to mean too many things to too many people. For more than a decade now, billions of dollars have been invested into ‘digital farming’ start-ups and tools, all promising to transform the industry.
Do a simple search in the app store for phrases such as farm management, grain marketing, herd management or any other common terms for apps that farmers might use, and you can scroll through countless pages of products. Most do similar things — store and visualize data, integrate weather feeds, show real-time commodity prices, and so forth. Yet none have had a major impact on the industry, and certainly have not transformed it.
The ambitions around digital farming investments often start with real problems. The global population continues to grow, incomes around the world are rising, meat protein demand is climbing, sustainability concerns are increasing needs for renewable biofuels — all requiring agriculture to push productivity upward. But then some app or widget gets delivered that doesn’t solve these problems in a meaningful way. Software should be a means to the end, not the end itself.
At Corteva Agriscience, we have taken a new direction.
Corteva is focusing on the concept of decision science to help farmers get the right products on the right acres, driving productivity and adding value.
We have refocused our attention on the problems, not just the software. Research shows that if farmers could always choose the right seed, they could potentially increase their yields by 15-20%. Similarly, each year 20-40% of crop production is lost to insect, disease, and weed pressure – most of which can be mitigated with optimal use of available crop protection products. These are the problems that, if solved, will drive productivity upward while also making agriculture more sustainable.
Corteva is applying decision science within our own R&D pipeline to deliver the right seed and crop protection products to solve farmer’s unique challenges.
To this end, we are moving away from the word digital and towards the concept of decision science.
By definition1, decision science is the collection of quantitative techniques used to inform decision-making. It includes decision and risk analysis, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis, constrained optimization, simulation modeling, constrained optimization, operations research, computer science, and much more.
While most fields of research focus on producing new knowledge, decision science is uniquely concerned with making optimal choices based on available information.
Corteva has been using decision science tools and techniques internally for decades. Every year, just like farmers, we have critical decisions to make that determine the success of our company and impact the future productivity of agriculture. While farmers must constantly make seed choices and assess crop protection options to defend against an ever-evolving set of pest threats, we must decide which products to take to market and which technologies to advance through our pipeline of innovation that can consistently and reliably outperform existing ones.
Using decision science, we have leveraged our 100-year history of corn breeding to deliver industry leading germplasm performance and have produced an innovative crop protection portfolio with more Green Chemistry awards2 than anyone else in the industry. We have been on a long-term journey to increase the amount of data that we collect on our products before launching them so we are confident they will deliver more value.
At the peak of the season, we collect over two million data points each day on how our products are performing in the field. We then use our analytics engines—which include cutting edge machine learning and artificial intelligence—to process these vast volumes of data to get to the right decisions about which products to commercialize.
Just as the amount of data we collect on our products has increased exponentially, farmers are also collecting an unprecedented amount of data on how products perform under a wide range of real-world conditions. It is only natural that when we talk about pivoting from digital tools to decision science, we leverage all the same capabilities and techniques we use internally to help them maximize their productivity.
This is why we recently made the change to integrate our digital farming teams into our Research & Development organization. We now have the same researchers developing recommendations for which products will work best on which fields while working alongside the people developing the next set of products for the market, all using the same decision science tools and capabilities.
What does the shift to focusing on decision science look like from our customers’ perspective? The future is less about the next software release and more about our customers knowing that when they use a Corteva product, we are helping them maximize their investment and increase productivity. Software will be essential to doing this, but it will be in the background. Software itself is not the product.
We have a long-standing reputation of being among the most trusted advisors on the farm, and we will weave software and decision science seamlessly into everything we have always done — support our customers to succeed.
At Corteva, we aspire to be the leader of innovative sustainable solutions for farmers worldwide, today and tomorrow. A significant part of how we accomplish this will be through harnessing the power of data and decision science.