For centuries, farmers have used calendars to predict nature. Now, a new generation of Latin American startups is trying to achieve this with artificial intelligence tools that promise to revolutionize agriculture in large countries like Brazil.
When Aline Oliveira Pezente, a 39-year-old entrepreneur from Brazil's Minas Gerais state (southeast), noticed a problem with industry trends in Brazil, the world's largest exporter of soybeans and corn, He worked for the multinational company Louis Dreyfus Commodities. ,beef.
She explains that producers need large upfront loans to purchase inputs such as seeds and fertilizers. But she faces a myriad of risks, both natural (droughts, floods, crop diseases, etc.) and financial (bankruptcies, falling prices, etc.) and faces caution from lenders.
Aline and her husband, Fabricio, decided to study this problem at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, where they earned a master's degree and specialized in artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis.
In 2018, they launched a startup company, Traive. The company collects large amounts of agricultural data and analyzes it with artificial intelligence to define risk for lenders and provide farmers with greater access to credit.
“Lenders used to use proprietary[risk analysis]models that were like huge Excel files. It is very difficult to create an equation that
“What used to take three months can now be done in five minutes and much more accurately,” she said.
Agricultural AI
Seven years later, Traive's customers include agribusiness giants such as Syngenta, financial technology companies, and Banco do Brasil, Latin America's second largest bank.
More than 70,000 producers use the company's platform, which has facilitated approximately $1 billion in financial transactions, Alaine said. The entrepreneur presented his work this week at Rio de Janeiro's Web Summit, a major technology event dubbed “Davos for geeks.”
Traive participated in a panel entitled “Data Harvesting: The Next Agricultural Revolution,” where entrepreneur Alejandro Mieses addressed the potential of AI in this field.
Farmers are increasingly turning to this tool to increase yields and profits, with applications such as autonomous tractors, drones tracking crop health, and intelligent cameras that recognize weeds for herbicide treatment. I am.
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 physics because we believe it is the starting point. We understand how water moves, how wind flows, and how different sun rays affect crops. “We need to understand what's going on,” he stressed at this year's Web Summit. This year's Web Summit included AFP as an associated media outlet. The difficulty, according to the panelist, is that his AI model needs to be trained using large amounts of data in a complex process.
“It takes a lot of resources. You need servers, you need a huge data warehouse,” said Mises, 39. Results are determined by the quality of your data.
Agriculture vs climate
The agricultural industry has faced criticism in countries such as Brazil, which has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse while also increasing environmental damage in key regions such as the Amazon rainforest, considered essential to combating climate change. .
Innovation optimists say that given that the world's population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, technologies such as AI are humanity's best hope for surviving without destroying the planet. I claim that there is.
Mariana Vasconcelos, 32, is the 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 need to produce with less land, less deforestation and less carbon emissions. How can we do that without technology?'' she asked.
Although agriculture is often at odds with nature, “technology is proving that it can actually restore the environment and work with nature…Agriculture is moving towards more sustainable models,” she concludes. I attached it.