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Nowadays, if there is one industry that unites all of Earth's eight billion inhabitants, it is agriculture. We all need to feed ourselves, every day. And it is agriculture that makes this right a reality, producing food of all kinds on every continent. However, the challenges ahead are greater than ever, and equally great solutions are needed to keep the right to healthy food intact. This is what was discussed in San Francisco to figure out how best to address the near future.
On March 14 and 15, at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit held in the California city itself, the future of global agriculture and the many challenges and opportunities it faces were discussed, with 140 speakers from 55 different countries, nearly 200 startups and more than 400 agribusiness companies, including giants and scale-ups of excellence.
Among the challenges, two are truly gigantic: the climate crisis and the population boom in many countries of the global south, which will bring the planet's population close to 10 billion within 30 years. Others are less known to the general public but equally important: for example, the high volatility of agricultural commodities.
Science and technology can lend us a hand in feeding humanity today and tomorrow, and in adapting to new climate scenarios (as well as drastically reducing CO2 emissions, a now very urgent priority). The big protagonist will be AI (Artificial Intelligence), the focus and goal of the great effort to digitize agriculture that universities, research centers, agribusinesses, governments and companies such as xFarm Technologies are leading, to make agriculture more environmentally and productively sustainable.
Everyone in San Francisco was talking about it. Agriculture must have access to concrete advice based on data, collected through sensors in the field, tractors and implements, satellites, smart cameras, etc. This will make it possible to develop new technologies to provide the farmer with timely indications and increasingly precise support for agronomic decisions, enabling him or her to make efficient use of water (a resource that is now invaluable even in many formerly rainy European countries) and inputs, to have better yields, and to enable the use of truly smart machines.
And this applies not only to farmers, but to many supply chains, OEM companies, insurance companies, food companies. Agriculture is a multifaceted and complex industry, and because of its specific nature, teamwork is necessary. That is why the use of farm management software is a unique opportunity to create a digital ecosystem that can interconnect all these players. I want to emphasize that today the modest exploitation of agricultural production data is a real problem, but one that digital platforms can solve by also enabling the calculation of scope 3 emissions (i.e., emissions related to farm activities, which account for the vast majority of emissions) from primary data.
In the agriculture of the coming decades (and this was obvious to everyone at the Summit), AI will play a crucial role. By analyzing data from multiple sources, algorithms will be able (and actually already can) provide farmers with recommendations on when to perform certain operations, through dynamic models capable of learning from the feedback obtained.
And in the not-too-distant future we will be able to predict commodity prices at base from data recorded by satellites, estimate the amount of CO2 sequestered in this or that field, and automate many operations that today require human intervention. Still, AI will be able to be used to improve disease recognition in plants and animals, helping the farmer take timely action.
In any case, the role of the human being will continue to be crucial: his sensitivity, intuition, and ability to contextualize every experience are not, and never will be, replaceable. Technology-even AI-is a support, but it cannot replace the fundamental contribution of farmers.
xFarm Technologies, as I mentioned above, is aggressively focusing on AI. We are strengthening our AI team to work even deeper on this new technological universe, and provide a product of increasing value for our 170,000 farmers around the world. Not surprisingly, my talk at the Summit was titled Sustainable AgTech Platforms: Making digitization a greater reality for more farmers: I showed how xFarm Technologies is supporting digitization in the agricultural sector, making it greener and equipped for the transformations of the 21st century.
In my interlocutors I found great curiosity and strong interest, because maximum awareness of the centrality of digitization (and of the urgency of making this transformation widespread: in the food company with thousands of farmers, as well as in the medium and small family-run businesses). Big players in the sector need to be more involved, because it is not easy to engage farmers in supply chains in paths of innovation and change, aimed at making their activities more sustainable; doing this, however, is possible, and we have already demonstrated it for large international supply chains.
In San Francisco we also talked about resilience to be built, climate smart commodities and climate investments, regenerative agriculture, robotics for agriculture, soil health, controlled environment farming, and much more. In short, the future was discussed in San Francisco. And when the Summit ended, after having yet another cup of coffee, I was full of hope: because the challenges in front of us human beings are yes enormous, but we can do it. We really can do it.
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