FEROZ SHEIKH
Why does Syngenta need farmers' data?
To be clear, Syngenta doesn’t need farmers’ data. Farmers use tools developed by Syngenta, feed this data into these tools and get insights for their own use. All the data they feed in remains for their own insights. Unless explicitly shared by the farmer with anonymisation, Syngenta doesn’t need this data, doesn’t use it for any other purposes, and doesn’t share it with anyone else.
However, when farming data is shared with the informed consent of farmers, it can benefit them by creating collective intelligence or tap into innovation and services from third parties. For example, when data about a certain disease is shared, all farmers nearby could get an alert and even ways to avoid being affected. It is a give-and-take approach: the more people share, the more accurate insights you’ll get.
Syngenta has built tools and ML/AI [machine learning/artificial intelligence] algorithms that combine computational agronomy to offer decision support to the farmers. These algorithms, when fed with macro/on-farm/micro data, give increasingly better and precise recommendations to farmers, such as variable