From coal mining to optimizing plant value creation
Making agriculture more efficient with new technological possibilities
Fertile soils and open landscape areas, a sensitized population and open potential for the further development of agriculture towards a bioeconomy open up completely new perspectives.
With the help of digitalization and artificial intelligence, it will be possible to tackle many of the challenges facing agriculture in the future as a result of climate change and the transformation of the economy.
Agricultural development regions are emerging from coal successor regions.
This promises not only new economic prospects, but also a focus on the demands of the future in terms of human supply: Digitally optimized plant value chains provide a basis for a variety of models for successfully supplying society and the processing industry with agricultural products, even under difficult conditions.
In a model bioeconomy region in the central German mining district of Saxony-Anhalt, landscape and economic potential is being used to create new sustainable, ecological and economic objectives for regions that were previously characterized by coal mining.
Development ideas for novel plant-based foods, pharmaceutical products and plant-based raw materials for the chemical industry of tomorrow are being created here – with a model character and nationwide appeal in the form of a Central German model region.
Here you will find an overview of the key unique selling points of the bioeconomy in the southern Saxony-Anhalt region:
- high concentration of leading international plant research institutes,
- Center for international genome and breeding research on cereals,
- Model region for biotic and abiotic stress caused by climate change,
- Focus on the cultivation and utilization of wheat (incl. straw) and sugar beet; very good prospects for expanding the production and utilization of legumes (e.g. peas) and agroforestry,
- Focus on specialty crops with high added value in the medicinal and aromatic plant sector,
- very good agricultural soils, agriculture is considered a central economic factor (within the lead markets of Saxony-Anhalt),
- Important center of the chemical industry in Germany (Central German chemical triangle Leuna, Schkopau, Bitterfeld),
- leading networks for the transformation of the chemical industry into a sustainable bioeconomy,
- established scaling platforms for biorefinery processes,
- established real-world laboratories for modelling and optimizing value chains using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML),
- years of experience and expertise in the socio-economic analysis and evaluation of structural change through bioeconomy.
