For centuries, farmers have used almanacs to try to predict nature. Today, a new generation of Latin American start-ups is contributing thanks to artificial intelligence tools that promise an agricultural revolution in giants like Brazil.
Aline Oliveira Pezente, a 39-year-old entrepreneur from the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, was working for the multinational Louis Dreyfus Commodities when she noticed a problem in the industrial dynamics of Brazil, the world’s largest soy exporter. , corn. and beef.
Producers need large upfront loans to purchase inputs such as seeds and fertilizer, she explains. But they face the caution of lenders in the face of countless risks, both natural (droughts, floods, crop diseases, etc.) and financial (bankruptcies, drop in prices, etc.).
Aline and her husband, Fabricio, decided to study the problem at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, where she earned a master’s degree and specialized in artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics.
In 2018, they launched the start-up Traive, which collects massive amounts of agriculture-related data and then analyzes it using artificial intelligence to define risks for lenders and facilitate access to credit for farmers .
“Lenders used their own (risk analysis) model, like a giant Excel file. But it is very difficult for humans, even with deep knowledge of statistics and mathematics, to create equations that capture all the nuances,” explains Aline.
Now, “we can do in five minutes and with much more precision what used to take three months,” she said.
AI for agriculture
Seven years later, Traive’s clients include agribusiness giants such as Syngenta, fintech companies and Latin America’s second-largest bank, Banco do Brasil.
More than 70,000 producers use its platform, which has facilitated nearly a billion dollars in financial transactions, explains Aline. The entrepreneur presented his work this week at the Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a major technology event called “Davos for geeks.”
Traive participated in a panel titled “Data Harvest: The Next Agricultural Revolution,” in which Alejandro Mieses, also an entrepreneur, discussed the potential of AI in the sector.
Farmers are increasingly turning to the tool to increase their yields and income, with applications including autonomous tractors, drones that track crop health, and smart cameras that recognize weeds for herbicide treatment.
Mieses’ 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 emphasize physics because we think that’s the starting point. We must understand how water moves, the wind, how different solar exposures act on crops,” he underlined during the Web Summit, this year’s edition of which was associated with AFP. The difficulty, according to panelists, is that AI models must be trained with massive amounts of data in a complex process.
“It requires quite a few resources: servers, a huge data warehouse are necessary,” explains Mieses, 39 years old. The result depends on the quality of the data.
Agriculture versus climate
The agricultural sector is under fire in countries like Brazil, whose rise as a sectoral power has also led to increased environmental destruction in key regions such as the Amazon rainforest, seen as vital against change climatic.
Innovation optimists say that with the world’s population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, technologies like AI are humanity’s best hope for survival without destroying the planet .
Mariana Vasconcelos, 32, is the CEO of Brazilian start-up Agrosmart, which 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 supply a growing population. At the same time, we must produce with less land, less deforestation and less carbon footprint. How can we achieve this without technology? she asked.
Even though agriculture is often at odds with nature, “technology is proving that it can actually restore the environment, work in collaboration with nature… Agriculture is moving towards a more sustainable model,” she said. concluded.
