Member Article

DigiFarm and Varda announce strategic partnership to expand coverage of Global FieldID™

Varda, the agtech startup founded by Yara, today announced its partnership with DigiFarm, Norway’s leading field boundary specialist, to expand coverage of Global FieldID™ through the ingestion of DigiFarm’s field boundaries. The collaboration will allow Varda to gradually scale its service offering globally, starting from the priority markets of Brazil and the United States, covering more than 175 million hectares, for a total of 25 million mapped fields.

The objective of Global FieldID™ is to establish a shared geospatial reference framework that encompasses the entire agriculture industry. Varda assigns unique IDs to each land plot, creating a ‘QR code for fields’, delivered to users via an API. The unique ID for every field enhances interoperability and collaboration across the supply chain, making it easier for stakeholders to exchange data and for farmers to comply with increasing demand for transparency on their practices. By accelerating the adoption of Global FieldID™ and increasing its geographic scope, the companies wish to bring the benefits of a more collaborative and transparent food system in key agricultural markets.

DigiFarm provides agricultural software for digital and satellite farming. This is achieved through developing deep neural network models that increase the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2 SatEO data from 10 meters to 1 meter per pixel. Their agtech solution accurately detects field boundaries and seeded acres for precision farming, providing innovative AI-powered solutions with the technology to detect accurate field level boundaries. Through this partnership, the scale of Global FieldID™ will increase and will benefit from DigiFarm’s high-quality boundaries, which possess historical data and offer global coverage.

Davide Ceper, CEO at Varda commented: “DigiFarm is a leader in field identification through earth observation technologies. We chose to partner with DigiFarm because of the high quality and competitiveness of their services, but our partnership is also grounded on common values and a shared vision for a more collaborative and sustainable food industry, and in tandem with our Global FieldID™ technology, we now have the potential to boost collaboration and together create a common language for the whole industry. This will help create a native positive food system on a global scale.”

Nils Helset, CEO of DigiFarm, expressed his excitement about the strategic partnership with Varda: “We’re incredibly excited about this partnership with Davide and the team. We envisage this being a strategic, long-term partnership which will bring innovation and real-world benefits, at scale, to the ag-industry. With Varda’s Global FieldID™ technology and our reliable high-quality boundaries, we have the potential to drive the adoption of a more sustainable and resilient food system on a global scale. Together, we will make a positive impact and pave the way for a more efficient and interconnected agriculture industry.”

Varda’s Global FieldID™ service is currently available in France, the Netherlands and the UK, and will be released in Brazil, the US and key European agricultural markets in 2023.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucy Jefferson .