Industry News | 03-20-2023

BASF Offers Digital Farming Tools

Precision tools are used on many farms today. Jeremy Zidek, digital product owner at BASF offers an update on digital tools that support or enable BASF products and agronomic insights for customers today. Zidek says BASF is going to be taking it up a notch where digital farming is concerned in 2024.
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Equine 9: Tales From a Volunteer Large-Animal Rescue Squad

Cattle stuck in pools. Horses in hay lofts. Calves in wells. Carrot-eating camels stuck in the stall. These are not the most recent viral videos on TikTok, they’re real-life incidents and rescue stories from the Little Fork Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company’s Technical Large Animal Rescue Team (TLAER). For these first responders in Virginia, these incidents are all in a year’s work — or, more technically, in a dozen years’ of work. Halloween 2011 was when the group went on its first call as an official unit of the rescue company. The call was for a cow in a pool. When they arrived at the scene, there were already reporters, a helicopter, and a vet there. The vet was the only one Chief Doug Monaco said he felt relieved to see.
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Northern Plains will get Syngenta's First Hybrid Spring Wheats in 2024

By this time next year, spring wheat growers in the Northern Plains will have limited access to the very first commercial hybrid wheat lines from Syngenta. It’s been a long journey to get to this point. In 2010, Syngenta announced it would begin working on hybrid wheat for North America. Hybrid wheat has been elusive for years, despite seed companies spending resources on the commodity. “For years we’ve been at meetings where we said hybrid wheat was five years away, and a few years later we were still five years away,” says Paul Morano, North America cereals head at Syngenta. "Now we’re glad to say we can do away with that statement, because we’re in the field seeing hybrid wheat growing.”
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California Dairy Farmers Prayed for Rain – Now it’s Forcing Some to Evacuate

Not long ago, California dairy producer Ryan Junio prayed for rain. The ongoing water scarcity challenges that faced the Golden State was the No. 1 concern for this Tulare County dairy farmer. “As a dairy producer, water scarcity is an ever-growing challenge and is my top concern,” Junio said last summer. Junio wouldn’t have thought that nine months later he would be dealing with a different water crisis, as massive flooding has wreaked havoc on California’s largest dairy hub, Tulare County, home to 330,000-plus dairy cows.
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Bayer Collaborates with Microsoft to Unveil new Cloud-Based Enterprise Solutions

Following a 2021 strategic partnership announcement with Microsoft, Bayer has launched new cloud-based solutions for the agri-food industry: AgPowered Services from Bayer in combination with the new Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture provide ready-to-use capabilities available for businesses and organizations from start-ups to global enterprises to license and use for their own internal or customer-facing digital solutions.
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