Joint project of BASF Digital Farming and Pessl to enhance fruit and veg production

BASF Digital Farming and Pessl Instruments have signed an agreement to cooperate globally on R&D activities to improve pest management in fruits and veg and thus enhance production.

This collaboration will pair BASF Digital Farming’s xarvio™ SCOUTING app, which enables image recognition and analysis, with the unique software and hardware capabilities of Pessl, specifically its automatized iSCOUT® pest trap. 

Thanks to combining precision data and advanced digital expertise in pest management offered by these two companies, for the first -time farmers will get near real-time, field level observations to further optimize crop cultivation.

Their first project together started in May in 2021 and is focused on the development of comprehensive pest monitoring and modelling for grapes and pome fruits, particularly apples, targeting the activities of the codling moth and grape berry moth. 

Through this project, they seek to create a completely automated pest recognition and monitoring service, which will originally be linked to xarvio SCOUTING in Europe, Brazil, Argentina, and India.

The second planned project will concentrate on the row crops of corn, soybean, and cotton, and will focus on the observation and modelling of corn earworm, fall armyworm, and stink bugs.

Bjoern Kiepe, Head of Agronomy xarvio, BASF Digital Farming, said that one of the main challenges in fruit and veg cultivation is obtaining timely field level pest monitoring data which can precisely indicate the damaging or treatable stage within a pest life cycle.

Kiepe hopes to solve this problem by connecting Pessl’s automated iSCOUT pest trap with xarvio SCOUTING’s image recognition and analysis. Precision farming helps provide the more efficient use of crop protection applications, which is beneficial for farmers, sustainability, and biodiversity.

With monitoring pests, they seek not only to identify the type of insects and the number of plants infected, but also to prevent the damage occurring. 

Gottfried Pessl, founder and CEO of Pessl Instruments, stressed that the fully autonomous solar powered insect trap iSCOUT enables it to monitor the pest risk 24/7, to process this data and to send it in near real-time for image recognition. This way, farmers obtain access to improved insect monitoring and better control anywhere, anytime. 

The pest recognition and monitoring service for grapes and pome fruit by BASF Digital Farming and Pessl Instruments is expected to be available from 2022.

Contact BASF Digital Farming:

Nathan Quigley

Specialist Media Relations

Mobile: +49 151 5519 3566

Email: nathan-sean.quigley@xarvio.com

Contact Pessl Instruments:

Neza Rustja

Marketing & PR

Email: marketing@metos.at

To read more about the companies, please visit this page.