Is Brazilian agriculture connected?

It's 6 am and Mr. Roberto, a grape producer in Padre Bernardo, a municipality in Goiás, sits down at the table for breakfast on his own farm. Between a sip of coffee and warm tapioca, using his cell phone, he checks grape prices on the website of the Brazilian Horticultural Market Modernization Program. He also reads reports on the evolution of the harvest in the São Francisco Valley, the evolution of the pandemic in Brazil and the devaluation of the Real. Worried about difficult times, he sends, via the WhatsApp application, some photos of Vitoria grapes harvested on his farm the day before to Mr. Saulo, a grape middleman based in Campinas / SP. With Saulo's immediate response, he sells five tons of Vitoria grapes with a minimum sugar content of 19 degrees Brix and packaged in 'cumbucas' weighing 500 grams each, to be delivered the next day in Belo Horizonte / MG.

After confirming the sale, Roberto sends WhatsApp messages to André, the person responsible for packaging and shipping the grapes on his farm. Immediately, André selects the boxes needed for harvesting and forwards the message to Valdomiro, responsible for harvesting on the farm. Valdomiro guides the harvesting teams, which begins less than an hour after Roberto confirms the sale. The information is shared in real time with José, who will transport the goods to Belo Horizonte.

Once the harvest is confirmed, Roberto accesses the bank's APP, issues the invoice against Saulo and only then “starts” the day, which in fact started much earlier. Everything done via cell phone. It may seem like fiction, but the facts narrated, except for the characters' names, are real and have been happening regularly on Mr. Roberto's farm.

Connected agriculture is already a reality in Brazil. It can be a “simple” connection via WhatsApp or a sophisticated connection embedded in machines. Regardless of sophistication, the impacts on productivity and your wallet are real.

Technology, which seems like fiction, is necessary to secure and expand Brazil's space as a global agricultural power. From the front door inwards, the main thing is to increase productivity, respecting the growing demands of societies that require healthy, quality food, produced in transparent, responsible systems that respect natural resources. From the outside, the challenges are even more complex, involving not only logistics but also institutions and policies to make markets and society aware that the competitiveness of agriculture is not spurious and is based on the sustainable use of the country's resources.

In this context, complexity is increasing, but processes need to be operated in a simple, transparent and sustainable way. It is in solving this equation that technologies associated with connected agriculture, also known as 4.0, come into play. There are countless possibilities for creating startups linked to Agriculture 4.0, including traceability mechanisms, which both contribute to the sustainable use of natural resources and empower consumers, transforming them, in fact, into “managers” of the value chain.

The problem is that this agriculture cannot function without adequate infrastructure and Brazil's is still in the last century. The infrastructure deficit is undoubtedly an obstacle to the expansion of agriculture 4.0 in Brazil and has rightly been the focus of the sector's concerns. Internet 5.0, developed by Brazil's main agricultural trading partner, China, is an interesting option, however, the solution will not be as easy as it seems. 5 G technology, the subject of fierce dispute between the USA and China, has already claimed victims like England.

It is also not possible to neglect the challenge related to the qualification of the workforce required by agriculture 4.0. The inevitable diffusion of new production systems could contribute to record unemployment and make a large number of small family establishments unviable, which are responsible for absorbing more than 50% of those employed in the sector.

Any reasonably informed person knows that Brazil does not invest adequately in education. In fact, there is a lack of structured policy to guide youth, especially rural youth, and enable projects and alternatives to salary employment at the end of high school. This is a serious problem since excluded workers and producers, generally with low education, no longer find space either in the activities in the urban environment, which traditionally absorbed them, or in the expansion frontiers. It is important to consider that the greatest marginalization, not by chance, will occur in the northeast region of the country.

Society and the agricultural sector demand effective actions not only to adapt the infrastructure and qualify the workforce required by agriculture 4.0, but also to generate enough business to house the population that will inevitably be relocated by the revolution on the way. The challenges of Agriculture 4.0 extend beyond agriculture and into international relations. However, Brazilian agriculture is dynamic enough to resolve these issues, all it takes is rationality. But it seems that we have specialized in complicating the simple and making the easy difficult and in this game we run a serious risk of letting yet another good opportunity pass us by.

Pedro Abel Vieira, Elisio Contini and Roberta Grundling, researchers from Embrapa; and Antônio Marcio Buainain, professor at the Unicamp Institute of Economics