Digital Department

Digital tools for farming and winegrowing

The Digital Agriculture department brings together Bordeaux Sciences Agro’s expertise in computer science, geomatics, statistics and, more generally, digital technologies for agriculture. Its engineers and professors provide teaching in these fields for all Bordeaux Sciences Agro courses: bachelor’s degrees, engineering master’s degree and lifelong learning.

The agro-ecological transition, which calls for a combination of all the components of sustainability, places information at the heart of the life sciences and agricultural sectors. Mastering digital technologies is a crucial issue for production and service organizations and companies, which look for professionals capable of understanding business needs and designing, evaluating and implementing innovative digital solutions to meet them.

Training & research

The AgroNum professional bachelor’s degree, co-organized with several agricultural high schools in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, and the AgroTIC master’s degree specialization, co-hosted with Institut Agro Montpellier, aim to train these professionals, technicians and engineers, with dual skills in agronomy and digital technology. These courses are offered on a student and work-study basis, and are complemented by professionalization contracts, specialty certificates and on-demand training courses.

To enhance its training programs, the department draws on a solid network of partners and skills developed within the framework of various research and transfer initiatives in the field of digital agriculture.

For instance, the department conducts research and development activities at the IMS laboratory, a joint CNRS unit, as part of the Signal and Image Group. The department’s engineers, PhD students and researchers work on computer vision and artificial intelligence. Together with academic and industrial partners, they address issues of remote sensing, proximal sensing or robotics, in agriculture (viticulture, arboriculture, horticulture), in forestry or in environment monitoring.

AgroTIC chair

In addition, the department, together with the Institut Agro Montpellier, holds the AgroTIC Chair, a corporate chair which, since 2017, has brought together around thirty companies and institutional partners.

This collective leads various actions and working groups aimed at promoting the dissemination of knowledge on digital technologies and their agricultural uses.

Digilab

At the interface between research, digital companies and players in the wine industry, the department runs the DigiLab.

This open innovation platform offers R&D players a network of sites and skills for developing, testing, evaluating and demonstrating digital technologies for vines and wine.