For centuries, farmers have used calendars to understand and predict weather patterns.
Now, a new startup in Latin America is leveraging artificial intelligence to help it do so, promising an agricultural revolution in agricultural powerhouses like Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, corn and beef. There is.
Aline Oliveira Pezente, a 39-year-old entrepreneur from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, was working at the agricultural company Luis Dreyfus Commodities when she noticed a problem with the way agriculture was run in Brazil. Ta.
Growers require huge amounts of credit upfront to purchase raw materials such as seeds and fertilizers, she said. But given how difficult it is to understand a myriad of risks, from natural disasters such as droughts, floods, crop diseases and erosion to bankruptcies and price crashes, lenders are becoming more cautious. There is.
In 2018, Aline and her husband Fabricio launched a startup called Traive that collects large amounts of agricultural data and analyzes it using AI to analyze lenders’ capital risk, making it easier for farmers to obtain loans.
“Previously, each financier used their own (risk analysis) model. Think of it like a huge Excel file,” Aline told AFP. “However, it is extremely difficult for humans, even those well versed in statistics and mathematics, to create equations that capture the nuances of all the variables.
“What we can do in five minutes and with much higher accuracy, it took them three months,” said Aline, who holds a master’s degree in AI and data analytics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I did.
～AI for agriculture～
Seven years later, Traive’s customers include agricultural industry giants such as Syngenta, fintech companies, and Banco do Brasil, Latin America’s second largest bank. More than 70,000 producers use the company’s platform, which has facilitated nearly $1 billion in financial transactions.
Aline presented his work this week at the Rio de Janeiro edition of Web Summit, a large tech gathering known as “Davos for geeks.”
Fellow entrepreneur Alejandro Mieses, who spoke alongside her on a panel called “Data Harvesting: The Next Agricultural Revolution,” explained how AI has the potential to reshape agriculture.
Around the world, farmers are turning to AI to improve yields and profits with applications such as self-driving tractors, drones that track crop health, and smart cameras that recognize weeds for herbicide treatment. This is happening more and more.
Mises’ Puerto Rico-based startup, TerraFirma, has developed an AI model that uses satellite imagery to predict environmental risks such as natural disasters, crop diseases, and erosion.
“We stick to the physics of it because we believe it is fundamental: how water moves, how wind moves, how different sun rays interact across farmland. “It’s about understanding what’s going on,” he said at Web Summit, where AFP is a media partner. this year.
The difficult part, the panelists said, is that AI models need to be trained on large amounts of data.
Farmers tend to be data-obsessed, meticulously tracking environmental conditions, inputs, and productivity, but collecting and processing that information around the world is complex.
“It’s very resource-intensive. You need servers, you need a huge repository of data,” says Mises, 39.
“It’s the old story of garbage in, garbage out.”
– Questions about climate –
The agricultural industry has faced criticism in countries like Brazil, which has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse, while environmental damage has soared in key areas such as the Amazon rainforest, a vital resource for combating climate change.
Innovation optimists argue that with the world’s population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, technologies such as AI are humanity’s best hope for surviving without destroying the planet. .
Mariana Vasconcelos is the 32-year-old CEO of AgroSmart, a Brazilian startup that uses AI to help farmers manage climate risks and produce more sustainably.
“The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says we need to increase food production to feed a growing population. At the same time, we must produce it on less land, with less deforestation and with less carbon emissions. Hmm, how can you do that without technology?” she said.
“Agriculture is often seen as the opposite of nature, but I think technology is showing us that we can actually regenerate, restore the environment, and work with nature…Agriculture can be more sustainable. We are moving toward a possible model.”
