Cargill partnered with Microsoft on a business-centric hackathon in Shanghai on April 8 and 9, 2019. The 48-hour Cargill APAC Hackathon saw active participation across several Cargill businesses in the region, and the three winning startups will be sponsored with a proof-of-concept opportunity within Cargill. As short, intensive events, hackathons enable small, competing teams to innovate and harness data to solve problems or create new products all while strengthening the innovation culture at Cargill.

Cargill has committed US$550,000 in support of the WFP Innovation Accelerator, which is specifically designed to identify, nurture and scale bold solutions to achieve zero hunger.   Cargill and the World Food Programme (WFP) Innovation Accelerator just announced a call for applications for the Global Innovation Challenge for Zero Hunger. Applicants can submit their proposal from February 4-28, 2019. The hope is for start-ups, private companies and NGOs to submit bold solutions that can sustainably lift people out of hunger.   This new collaboration builds upon several other programmes Cargill and WFP have jointly launched since the partnership began in 2001. To date, Cargill has provided more than US$12 million to WFP to improve the health and nutrition of people in need around the globe, with an emphasis on developing countries.

Descartes Labs specializes in machine learning and refining large data sets from sources like satellite imagery. Cargill's partnership with Descartes enables it to analyze huge quantities of data to better forecast crop production both globally and locally.

Cargill leverages these new tools to continue to enhance our risk management capabilities that directly benefit our customers and manages our supply chains in a more efficient manner.

Farmers watch the markets every day. They click from website to website to get up-to-date news and information. Cargill understands that this is a frustrating, time-wasting experience. So, they created Bumper.

Bumper is a free, U.S.-based mobile app that helps farmers save time, stay informed and make smart grain and oilseed marketing decisions.

With Bumper, farmers can quickly and easily get all the information they need — grain and oilseed futures prices, local weather updates and market news — all in one place. The data collected from the Bumper app will help Cargill learn more about farmer interests, what content they like and share, and what future mobile app engagement might be like. To date, Bumper has close to 6,000 active users.

The Nature Conservancy, in collaboration with Nestlé Purina and Cargill, launched a three-year water project to improve the sustainability of the beef supply chain.

This project is expected to reduce the environmental impact of row crop irrigation in Nebraska and provide a scalable irrigation solution for farmers across the U.S. More than 50 percent of water used in U.S. beef production is dedicated to irrigating the row crops that become feed for cattle.

By putting first-of-its-kind, cost-effective technology in the hands of farmers, the amount of water needed for row crop irrigation is greatly reduced.

Cargill has consumer data that shows a high interest in transparent food supply chain practices that in turn contribute positive brand sentiment when shopping.

The potential to increase brand preference, turkey sales and market share, led to piloting a digital way to show consumers where their turkey was raised and the family who raised it.

The pilot for traceable Honeysuckle White® brand turkeys uses a first-to-market blockchain-based solution. Blockchain models build a trusted, transparent food chain that integrate key stakeholders into the supply chain and create a distributed ledger with immutable records. The technology also reduces the risk of fraud or human error, and cryptography within the network ensures security, authentication and integrity of transactions.

Three quarters of a ton. That’s the size of the average bovine moving through Cargill’s beef plant in Schuyler, Nebraska. Multiply that by 5,000 — approximately how many head of cattle the facility processes on a daily basis — and you begin to understand the scale of the potential safety risks that are inherent to working alongside these hefty mammals.

Lately, plant workers have had some help from a new co-worker: a remote-controlled robot. The robot will now do all the cattle driving, while employees safely control it from a catwalk. While fine-tuning the technology, this type of innovation could very well be replicated at other Cargill locations, both beef and beyond.

In a nod to its open-first technology principle to help address the world’s most significant food challenges, Cargill is investing its own digital engineering to aid the success and adoption of Hyperledger Grid. The latest project in Hyperledger’s portfolio of open-source frameworks and tools, Hyperledger Grid is created to accelerate development of blockchain and other digital solutions for the global food and agriculture supply chains.

A proposal, co-sponsored with Intel, for a top-level Digital Supply Chain project has been accepted by Hyperledger. Hyperledger is a global, open-source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies for finance, banking, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology.

This project positions Cargill as a key contributor to open platforms for digital supply chains, including blockchain, as we continue to make significant engineering contributions to Sawtooth platform development and other open technologies.

At Cargill, we are working towards a zero incident culture to ensure the safety of our people, communities, products and the environment, no matter where we are in the world. To achieve this goal we must be able to identify, analyze and correct non-conforming situations, and use data better to prevent incidents.

Ca​rgill's Enablon Event Management application is Cargill's single, common incident management system, a powerful tool that will help us reach zero harm so our people and our communities can continue to thrive.

Cainthus is an Irish firm specializing in facial and movement recognition, with an artificial intelligence platform that identifies individual dairy cows and then employs algorithms to recognize changes in behavior and predict performance.

Cargill invested in the Cainthus platform to help dairy farmers optimize their operations and earn more per animal. The Cainthus platform augments the manual process of observation, providing more precise, timely and efficient animal monitoring.

Cargill and Agriness, the technology leader in Latin American swine production, recently announced a strategic partnership that will foster industry-wide transformation and bring emerging digital technologies to farmers around the world.

This partnership will help farmers improve production efficiency and farm profitability. We are working together to build a digital ecosystem that combines Cargill's scale with the technical skills and capabilities of Agriness to address challenges at the farm level.

Poultry Enteligen changes the way poultry producers look at data, from historical, backward-facing analyses in disconnected systems to real-time data for today’s performance and forward-looking predictions. Bringing the data into one system allows users to see how decisions can impact performance and profitability for the enterprise, from hatch to processing.

The Poultry Enteligen platform connects the supply chain, allowing for powerful analysis using machine learning models. The first offering, PE Broiler, includes digital data collection and visualization in a mobile application with real-time live production predictions, a platform for communication between growers and technical service personnel, and technical service visit planning. Launched in Brazil in 2018, plans are underway to expand globally in 2019.

Cargill Kokoo Sourcing Limited (Cargill's Licensed Buying Company in West Africa) establishes digital-platform sourcing from farmers in cocoa communities. Through our innovative system, Cargill reaches 13,000 farmers and has helped bring a new way of doing business in West Africa's cocoa sector. Cargill is able to weigh, transport and qualify check beans all virtually. This initiates a fully traceable bar-code system of the physical beans. Cargill then pays farmers via mobile money payments. Kokoo Sourcing helps ensure that Cargill’s West Africa cocoa supply chain is 100% UTZ certified and traceable.

In the Ghanian market, the combination of mobile technologies has never been used before and is driving sector transformation. These systems improve trust and our relationship with farmers and our customers. Cargill is implementing a similar system in Ivory Coast.

Cargill Digital Labs and Data Science teams empowered trade execution managers with an application to improve logistics and profitability. The application, called OptiTrade, also allowed SA TET to analyze hypothetical scenarios on the fly, sustainably and without outside intervention, to forecast the impact of shifting variables or experiment with new information.

iQuatic™ is a mobile data application that syncs to a live farm operations dashboard providing real-time insights and predictive analytics. The tool allows for greater decision making on what is occurring within the farm by capturing data, such as animal size, dissolved oxygen levels, and weather into models to solve challenging questions or problems.

As the iQuatic™ platform records more data, the models learn more about the animal operations to help improve decision-making. As a result, these models help inform decisions that improve harvest results, decrease input costs and run operations more efficiently.

Dairy Enteligen is a data tool that helps farmers stay in control of their productivity by combining real-time data inputs from a herd management system into a decision-making dashboard. Dairy Enteligen tracks key information, including milk productivity, animal health and comfort, and feed formulation.

Often from multiple software programs, DE combines all inputs into one comprehensive system, allowing farmers to make precise decisions on feed and farm management practices.

Cargill is researching how audio data collected from birds on poultry farms can be used to help improve animal health and welfare. Using machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Cargill data scientists have been analyzing chicken vocalizations to try to identify patterns and changes that may signal a health or welfare problem before it’s apparent to the human eye.

Recently, agribusinesses Archer Daniels Midland Company (“ADM”), Bunge Limited (“Bunge”), Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus ("LDC") announced plans to modernize global agricultural commodity trade operations. Driven by opportunities to increase transparency and efficiency for customers, global agribusinesses are turning to emerging digital technologies – including blockchain and artificial intelligence options – to reduce resource- and time-intensive processes associated with the global agricultural commodity value chain.

Initially, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and LDC are focused on technologies to automate the grain and oilseed post-trade execution processes, as they represent a highly manual and costly part of the supply chain, with the industry spending significant amounts of money every year moving documents around the globe.

Cargill recently partnered with the Archer Daniels Midland Company to form a technology joint venture, Grainbridge LLC.

The venture intends to provide grain marketing decision support, e-commerce and account management software for North American farmers. This includes the development of digital tools designed to help farmers across the U.S. and Canada consolidate information on production economics and grain marketing activities into a single digital platform, at no cost to them.

Cargill is a co-sponsor of the Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator Program, which runs through 2021. The three-year program, now in its second year, provides startups with coaching and mentorship that help them secure capital and expand their industry reach. Accelerators are one way that Cargill creates space for innovation more effectively than ad-hoc individual networking and without the cost to create and manage a venture fund.