Good people, good night.
I’m Mariana Vasconcelos.
I’m Itaububian, so it’s an honor to be here today talking to you.
I am from here and I grew up in family of producers,
following the challenges of day-to-day decision-making,
of my family and of the rural producers of my region,
who were always there relying on their intuition,
in the knowledge that was passed down for generations,
and even copying, one neighbor copies the other,
to decide what to do in the field.
To understand how the plantation was developing,
if there were diseases, whether it should be irrigated or not.
And over the years, we began to see how the effects
of climate change were affecting our production capacity,
and diminishing the income of that region, which is here on our side in Pedralva.
And that’s why I wanted to start my business:
with the goal of helping producers like my father,
like other producers in my team’s family,
to have more confidence in this decision-making.
And I’m here today to share with you.
a little of my passion for agriculture,
and my vision of the challenges and the future.
Agriculture, in itself, is a topic …
because in fact she is part of everyone in the day to day,
of each one of you, in your food,
We forget where the food comes from.
We forget to stop and argue about it,
even more so in Brazil,
where 23% of our GDP is directly related to agriculture.
I do not know if you accompany,
we have had a lot of evolution in technologies,
who are attending agribusiness.
Since the 1960s, 1970s,
Brazil was only the country of sugar cane and coffee;
we did not know how to produce other things, we did not have technology.
And that is where institutions, government and researchers
began to realize
that, in order to have one of the only agricultural berths of tropical climate,
it was not enough to import technology.
Bring something out there and try to apply here, as it was being done
in the oil industry, construction, etc.
So our producer, our industry
had to develop on its own to reach the threshold we are today.
Today Brazil is the largest producer,
exporter of coffee, sugar cane and orange juice.
It is the largest exporter in the soybean complex.
It is estimated that by 2030, one-third of the food produced in the world,
originated in Brazil.
But despite all these advances, we still have many challenges ahead.
The first one is:
how will we feed 9 billion people by 2050?
That means we need to increase our food production by 70%.
And almost all of this increase
is expected to use technology to increase productivity.
And only 10% related to the increase of land,
mainly in Latin America and Africa.
But even if we can increase all this production,
if we do not have investment in distribution and storage,
which is the infrastructure of our country, storage technology,
we will still have 5% of the population of developing countries
starving.
And for us to increase this production,
We talked about technology,
one of the main tools is water.
Because it allows us to plant out of season,
that we have more than one crop during the year,
it allows us to plant in regions
previously unsuitable for planting, such as Brazilian saws.
Today, only 20% of the world’s planted area is irrigated,
but it produces about 40% of our food.
So it is a consensus that one of the main ways
to increase production is by irrigating:
when we give water in the right measure for the plant,
we stimulate development potential.
But on the other hand, we are suffering from the water crisis.
Today, 72% of freshwater in Brazil,
and 70% worldwide, is used in irrigation.
Almost half of this is wasted
for lack of knowledge of how to apply this water.
To complicate the situation a little more, in addition to water,
we have climate change.
If on one hand we are trying to gain productivity using water,
we are losing productivity due to climate change.
It is estimated that to each degree on average that rises in temperature,
we lost 2% in agricultural productivity.
In Brazil there is an 8% loss of productivity
attributed to climate change results.
And besides the loss of productivity, the other effect of climate change
is the geographic redistribution of crops.
So before we had regions that were not suitable for cultivation,
for example Canada,
and are now getting warmer and more propitious.
With this, we have this new discovery on what I should plant,
in my own region.
If a producer wanted to start a crop before, he went to EMBRAPA, EMATER,
and asked, “What do I have to do?
What is the ideal thing for my region, for my cultivation?
What is the ideal temperature and the amount of ideal water I need? “
And with these ever-faster changes,
it is as if the producer had to learn everything again.
So those researches that we have in the gym, after a year, two years,
they no longer apply!
So imagine how the producer is in the middle of it all:
being pressed by a larger production,
but at the same time with less resources and more sustainable.
And I imagine that you are thinking there
in all this information we just said, so many numbers …
Imagine the producer who is there in the day to day,
which has to observe and react to this change,
increasingly difficult for him to adapt.
But on the other hand,
where there are problems, there are opportunities,
and so agribusiness is now a hot industry seeking innovations
and technologies to achieve
sustainability and production objectives.
And I’ve drawn three exponential technologies here,
which I understand are transforming agriculture in the very near future.
And the first one we are going to talk about is the “blockchain”.
The millennials that are the people of Generation X, Y, Z,
born after 1980,
have a much more complex profile of consumption,
and began to demand a more transparent supply chain,
a pattern of sustainability and positive impact.
With this, the food industries began to require their producers
which followed a certain pattern of sustainability,
and could have traceability of their chain.
But on the other hand it is very difficult for us to have precise data from the farm,
to our table.
Although we already have a lot of technology today, we
on the packaging of the product and see where it is from,
what’s happening,
there is little security to verify that the information is true and reliable.
In a case such as fair trade with coffee, which we call fair trade,
in which each producer at its origin,
should receive about $ 0.50,
it ends up receiving, from this productive chain, about US $ 0.05,
because of challenges that happen in the middle of the way.
And then the blockchain has a power
through the creation of a network of trust and transparency,
because it manages to track every asset, every digital transaction,
with a history and a property.
So let’s assume in the case of food poisoning,
we can quickly identify where that product comes from,
and regulators can act much more quickly,
to mitigate the risks of this problem before it spreads.
This is because each end of the chain:
the producer, the distributor, the logistic operator, the retailer,
can see the same asset, and that history he has,
who is the property, and every transaction that was made needs to be approved
for each of that chain.
So we no longer have the local storage and processing of this information,
but they are distributed over computers all over the internet,
thousands of computers.
And this distribution and encryption,
reduces the risk of fraud and inefficiencies in the system.
So if someone tries to change a system in the case of fair trade,
if someone tries not to pay the producer what he deserves to receive,
or if the supermarket receives a fraudulent product …
To try to modify any of this information in this string,
that today we can lie there on the label, today there is this information,
it would be necessary for each computer on the internet to process this information
approve that change.
And this becomes almost impossible, requires half of the computational processing,
Worldwide.
So we see the power that the blockchain has
when we speak now of digital agriculture, of information, of data.
Where do we want our data to be stored?
Where producer data will be secure,
where he can see, the producer and the supplier can see.
And here is the potential for transformation of the blockchain.
The second technology,
which has greatly changed agribusiness, is Artificial Intelligence.
Inside the AI we have the “machine learning”
which modified the way we program computers.
In the past it was necessary for someone with deep knowledge of the problem
and programming skills to start programming and step-by-step
of how that problem should be solved through functionalities.
So he builds the solution to the problem in a program.
Now, we are able to feed those programs with data,
already trained, with checks,
stipulating the result that we want to achieve and the computer program alone
can follow and come to the conclusion in their own way.
Within machine learning,
the biggest trend we have is “deep learning”,
in which the same is done as the machine learning,
but we can feed the software with raw data,
without having to classify them previously by a person.
So let’s take an example:
there are thousands of scientists trying to discover genetic traits,
that help our plants
to be more resilient to droughts, diseases, and pests.
For them to understand what these genetic traits are,
they need to understand the gene sequence of plants.
But to understand this, there are millions of options
for each variety of seed we want to build,
it’s almost impossible.
In the case of deep learning
we can feed, for example, decades of field data,
how a seed performed in a given climate,
in a particular soil, and what are the genetic traits she inherited
and create a probabilistic model on top of that.
So I can with deep learning estimate what the probability is
of a specific gene to benefit a trait that I want to mark on my plant.
In this same context, we can also use machine learning
to simulate computationally scenarios.
So how do I test performance?
of different seeds in different climates and soils,
and I can predict more safely,
as a specific seed will work on my farm.
And yet another application, even simpler,
is one of the main means to detect diseases in a plantation, is the visual,
which is inefficient and susceptible to human error.
And with machine learning,
if we fed a software with thousands of photos of diseases,
he can, after a while, automatically see a plant,
identify the disease, its severity
and to provide a recommendation to the producer.
So AI allows us to see things we could not
as a human being, to process that amount of data,
identify patterns and help growers to choose the best seeds
and to make better use of its resources.
The latest technology I would like to talk to you,
is the part of genetic editing.
We spent a lot of time talking about genetics in agriculture,
limited to genetically modified organisms and transgenic,
in which we had many debates about the safety of these processes,
of genetic modification and the environmental impacts that this could generate,
along with the pesticides that would be taken to the field.
And a technological innovation that is coming to change this scenario is CRISPR / Cas9,
which is a technology that allows direct genetic editing in DNA,
removing the undesirable genetic part.
And since this does not involve adding new genetic material,
it is not a transgenic food.
This advance may seem complex to think, “I’ll get a DNA …”
To do this, one must understand the genetic functions and be able to create plants
which are resistant to drought, certain diseases, pests,
that produce more, without turning that food into a genetic thing.
And as complex as this process may seem to us, it is actually very simple,
very fast, repeatable and is cheaper than the previous genetic editing.
This brings a new world of possibilities to agribusiness, so that
adapt to those changes mentioned in the beginning.
The impact of this technology goes beyond agribusiness,
since one of the main characteristics of CRISPR is to be able to do
the genetic editing, in living organisms.
So, scientists are using this technology,
to find the cancer cure.
It has already been possible, for example, to remove the HIV virus
of infected human cells.
So we can do a lot with this technology,
but it also brings ethical debates.
So the blockchain comes to answer: who has my data?
Who can do something with the information I have
to apply the genetic editing?
In the case of humans, it can be beneficial, as in reducing disease,
but she can also raise babies
that are born without specific congenital diseases,
or slow and reverse aging.
Within this scenario that we discussed,
all of these technologies are exponential and data dependent.
So I can not get a transparent network
from my supply chain of the origin of my food
if I can not get the information coming from the producer.
I can not do Artificial Intelligence
if I do not have enough data to feed this software.
And I can not do genetic editing.
if I do not have the data to understand what is happening.
And that’s when I found an opportunity to make a difference,
to be able to raise data to generate this type of model.
So I created my business based on the difficulty I had in the house
decision-making in the field.
To through a network …
without the need for a cellular signal or the internet, to be able to collect data
in real-time field.
We were able to evaluate soil, temperature, climate, plant development.
And combine this with satellite imagery to generate recommendations.
And today I can work on the whole chain,
since the production of the seed,
in which I provide those climatic and environmental data
so that the company that develops the seed
can work the genetic material in the best way,
evaluate the impact of your product on the field.
From there I go to the producer during the day to day;
I help you every day to make irrigation decisions, if there is risk of disease,
alert you about the weather, so that it can better plan your operation
and create climate resilience.
We can reduce water use by up to 60% in irrigation,
40% of energy cost,
and increase productivity by up to 20%.
And finally there in the last chain, which is the food chain,
as I bring all this information I have, from the seed of the producer
and I assure you for the food and beverage industries,
that it has a sustainable network, that it will have supplies,
if there is a drought, it will not run out of product,
so that we in the end, in the consumer,
we can see all this in the chain much more clearly.
This is where we see the power of data and information.
And since each of us here has the power to change an entire chain,
the food chain.
If in our behavior, when I spoke of millenials,
we choose to buy a better product, want to know the origin of our product,
we encourage the food company to invest in traceability,
to demand from the producer that it be sustainable,
and the producer to demand the sowing, the chemical producer,
that they are also doing
a more constructive and sustainable process.
Well, in short, that’s it.
I came here and I think I got it
show a little of the challenges that lie ahead,
which are huge, but the opportunity and the tools for us to solve,
They’re already there!
And I invite each of you
approaching, go visit a farmer in the field,
go understand where this food comes from,
so that we can together,
feed 9 billion people and create more sustainable agriculture.
Thanks.
(Applause)
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