Chris Paterson leads the Bayer CropScience Digital Farming initiative (XARVIO.com) in North America, and resides in Calgary, Alberta. Chris has been involved with agronomy and agribusiness across North America for 25 years, and for the past 10 years has been directly involved with the development of business applications around emerging technologies that generate, or consume farm data. The Digital Farming team that Chris leads has technical competencies in agronomy, data science, IT, and precision Ag technologies.
Together with colleagues from South America and Europe, the team has been able to rapidly evolve from recruitment of the right people, to raw ideation and conceptualizing, through product development and ground truthing, to full commercialization and revenue generation in 3 years. Because Bayer Digital Farming has an approach to the market that focuses on collaboration with other companies, his team has involvement with a broad spectrum of companies and technologies including farm data management platforms, equipment sensors, weather and imagery sensors, robotics, artificial intelligence, wireless mobile connectivity, etc.
Chris will introduce some trends that are driving (or preventing) adoption of precision ag and farm data technologies on North American farms, show some potentially disruptive technologies to watch for, and reveal where Bayer Digital Farming thinks their opportunity is emerging.
