The why, how, what and where of Ag innovation.

If you head north at the Mellow Mushroom pizza joint and keep going past Daylight Donuts, then you’ll quickly arrive at the forefront of global agricultural innovation. The Bayer R&D facility in Chesterfield, MO is home to dozens of rooftop greenhouses, as many labs and the future of farming. 

The latest in crop genetics. AI-assisted breeding. Tomorrow’s digital technologies. Advanced, small molecule chemistry. And a tour that was held together with Scotch tape and poster boards. 

Bayer was ready to create an experience that lived up to the science going on within the same walls. We won the opportunity to design and execute it. That was the good news. 

The other news was that stiff competition and intellectual property concerns meant there wasn’t much that tour goers could actually see. Bayer wanted school groups, policy makers, employees and the public at large to get an inside view of crop science R&D. But they couldn’t risk revealing any proprietary technology or competitive advantages. That inside view wasn’t much of a view. 

So we created an entire experience, often from the ground up, to tell the story of farming innovation. 

Large groups would often be split into smaller concurrent tours, crisscrossing their way around the campus, so we developed a navigational system that would provide context without requiring a set order:

Why We Innovate / The Lobby

Before the what, how and where, everyone starts here. The lobby is where the need for continued crop science innovation becomes evident, the “why.” Interactive touch screens and large, live updating displays capture global challenges and the potential for agriculture to help us address them. The room is a self-guided exploration full of custom 3D animations, user-controlled videos, intriguing questions and surprising stats.

What We Grow / Breeding and Seed Innovation

From the lobby, the tour could head in any of a handful of directions. This one takes you back in time to the world’s first farm, and to the future of low-gravity space agriculture, exploring leaps in breeding and genetics along the way. A large wall with four rows of 16 pea plants serves as the backdrop to a projection mapping presentation that mixes film and illustration with the tangible potted plants to explain inherited – and designed – traits. 

How We Grow / Digital Farming

Drive by today’s modern farm and you’ll see little more than a fabric of natural earth tones. Greens, yellows, browns and blues. Crops, soil, water and sky. How do you demonstrate the sophisticated digital technology at work when it’s all but invisible to the naked eye?

Our answer: Augmented Reality. We designed a series of six terraced tables, each representing an important, and diverse, growing region around the world. When viewed through the iPad, rich data, predictive insights and intelligent automated farming systems emerged from between the rows to show just how advanced one of humanity’s oldest pursuits has become.

Where We Grow / Crop Protection

No two farms are exactly alike. Depending on where a farmer decides to bury his shovel, the specific climatic and environmental conditions can create a unique cocktail of pest and disease pressures. Protecting crops has come a long way from the days of scarecrows and hand-weeding. In the most analog stop along the tour, we created a gallery style exhibit with artifacts depicting a steady march toward increasingly precise, targeted and efficient biological solutions. 

Art Direction - Jon Simons & Christian Fricke
Art Direction & Co-Creative Direction - Tyson Foersterling
Writing & Co-Creative Direction - Terry Stewart