Yara and AWS to Digitalize Crop Nutrition Production System

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will assist world-leading crop nutrition company Yara in building a Digital Production Platform (DPP) to further improve safety, reliability, product quality and plant efficiency.

The Yara Digital Production Platform aims to reduce Yara’s environmental footprint, supporting the company to deliver on its mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet.

Today, Amazon Web Services is announcing a strategic engagement with Yara, a global leader in farming solutions, to build Yara’s next-generation Digital Production Platform (DPP). This platform will be the key enabler for Yara to digitalize its production system, consisting of 28 production sites (with a total of 122 production units that feature different production processes like NPK, ammonia, nitric acid, nitrate granulation and carbon dioxide plants) and two mines. AWS is Yara’s preferred cloud provider for the DPP, which aims to make production more efficient, reliable, sustainable, and safe. The DPP will serve as the digital core to securely capture and analyze new and existing data to gain insights.

Combined with applications built on top of the DPP, Yara aims to accelerate operational excellence by optimizing throughput in a safe and sustainable way, reducing energy consumption, minimizing plant downtime, and improving safety and quality control across Yara’s production sites, spanning locations in Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and North America. To achieve this, Yara will combine data gathered from production and business systems into a global data lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The platform will use the full breadth and depth of AWS technologies, including internet of things (IoT), compute, storage, analytics, and machine learning, to optimize utilization of assets such as compressors and pumps, and also process safety, asset reliability, and production volumes. It will also make use of new technologies such as drones and robotics, which will help employees avoid hazardous situations like when entering confined spaces or working at heights.

The DPP will use AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, and AWS IoT Analytics, to detect, collect, and run sophisticated analytics on production data linked to productivity, reliability, environment, safety, quality and innovation. By applying AWS analytics and machine learning services, such as Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly) to the data, Yara can predict product quality and composition, improve balancing of the site utilities, and detect when machines need repair or maintenance to keep production at optimal efficiency levels.

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The new DPP will also support the creation of a Yara Digital Production ecosystem where partners such as suppliers, distributors, manufacturers, and startups will be able to connect, integrate, and collaborate on new business models.

“Yara’s vision is simple yet extremely powerful. Through our worldwide operations we seek to contribute to a collaborative society, a world without hunger, and a planet respected. The digitalization of our production system contributes to all these goals,” said Marcus Furuholmen, VP Digital Production in Yara. “The new Yara DPP will help us substantially improve efficiencies, foster collaboration with partners on new business models, and most importantly, increase the quality of our fertilizer products, which will lead to more mouths fed globally in a sustainable way.”

“We are proud to help Yara with its important mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet for years to come. The transformation of their production system is yet another example of how AWS helps and supports customers’ unique innovation endeavors,” said Bill Vass, VP of Technology, AWS, Inc. “The Yara and AWS collaboration will have a profound impact on Yara’s global production system. With AWS as its preferred DPP cloud provider, Yara gains access to the broadest and deepest set of cloud functionality, the highest performance and security, and the largest community of partners and customers of any other infrastructure provider.”

About Yara

Yara grows knowledge to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet. Supporting our vision of a world without hunger and a planet respected, we pursue a strategy of sustainable value growth, promoting climate-friendly crop nutrition and zero-emission energy solutions. Yara’s ambition is focused on growing a climate positive food future that creates value for our customers, shareholders and society at large and delivers a more sustainable food value chain.

To achieve our ambition, we have taken the lead in developing digital farming tools for precision farming, and work closely with partners throughout the food value chain to improve the efficiency and sustainability of food production. Through our focus on clean ammonia production, we aim to enable the hydrogen economy, driving a green transition of shipping, fertilizer production and other energy intensive industries.

Founded in 1905 to solve the emerging famine in Europe, Yara has established a unique position as the industry’s only global crop nutrition company. We operate an integrated business model with around 17,000 employees and operations in over 60 countries, with a proven track record of strong returns. In 2020, Yara reported revenues of USD 11.6 billion.

Photo Credit: Yara/Dag Frode Heiland