Investments include the establishment of an Asia Pacific Head Office, new research and development facilities and a collaboration to encourage Ag-Tech entrepreneurship.
Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture division of DowDuPont has opened its Asia-Pacific head office in Singapore and announced a series of investments geared towards building expertise and technical capability to support farmers across the region, as governments seek to strengthen food security.
These investments include the establishment of a global analytics center of excellence and a new research and development (R&D) lab, as well as a collaboration strategy designed to encourage the further development of the Asia-Pacific Ag-Tech start-up ecosystem.
In conjunction with the opening of the Asia Pacific head office, Corteva Agriscience announced a collaboration between its Global Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) with South East Asian (SEA) sustainable agriculture platform, Grow Asia, as part of its commitment to engage with stakeholders across the food value chain.
Corteva Agriscience will collaborate with Grow Asia to actively work with Ag-Tech start-ups and other key players in the agriculture ecosystem to explore strategic initiatives addressing the needs of smallholder farmers across SEA. These collaborations are aimed at providing farm enterprises across the region with better access to agricultural insights, decision-making tools, e-commerce channels and new markets with the help of digital solutions.
ACE plans to help address some of the challenges unique to agriculture through the application of data science and analytics. The center will explore merging simulated and real-time data, enabled by the power of the cloud, to develop predictive capabilities for weather patterns, disease and pest threats impacting agriculture. This will support farmers in planning for growing seasons.
By applying artificial intelligence on data streaming from multiple sources, Corteva Agriscience aims to gain actionable insight on regional and global food supply chains. The center also plans to use blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to help farmers and food suppliers meet increasing government, regulatory and consumer demands for food traceability and provenance authentication.
Singapore is also home to the company’s newest Product Design and Process R&D lab, which joins a network of three other similar facilities globally – Indianapolis (US), Drusenheim (France) and Franco da Rocha (Brazil). A key focus of this research group is to ensure the successful commercialisation of the strong pipeline of products and technologies developed by Corteva Agriscience. By bringing to market environmentally sustainable, differentiated and patented technologies for strategic food crops, including rice and corn, Corteva Agriscience will help farmers protect their crops and to grow more.
Corteva Agriscience represents the combined strengths of DuPont Crop Protection, DuPont Pioneer and Dow AgroSciences, which spun off on 1 June 2019 to publicly list on the New York Stock Exchange. [APBN]