Transformational sustainability in the Brazilian agricultural chain

In May of this year, the IBM Institute for Business Value released the results of the report “Own Your Impact: Practical Pathways to Transformational Sustainability,” a study aimed at CEOs. Based on three thousand interviews with executives in 40 countries, the research emphasized the issue of Transformational Sustainability, which occurs when the practice becomes an integral part of an organization's business strategy.

The concept of this term encompasses digital technologies in a strategic and operational way to “generate sustainable results, while expanding economic opportunities” in an ongoing process. This can be applied to all companies in the most diverse activities, and in agribusiness, of course, it couldn't be any different! In the case of FertiSystem, for example, the search for sustainability is also related to the application of fertilizer at a variable rate in the seeding line.

Within the continuous planting process we want to extend this idea to other organizations in the sector, so that it serves as a catalyst. In this transformation of machines, we also need to think about new business models. To achieve this, it is essential that we work together so that producers, planter manufacturing companies, and scientific and technological communities also become environments for discussion. So, for this message to reach academia and research entities.

Our biggest challenge is communication, making this idea of ​​the importance of transformational sustainability reach all four corners. I am assuming the presidency of the Agro Technological Park – Tecnoagro, and we are in contact with associations, companies, cooperatives, public, state and municipal bodies, it is a way of working and leveraging this issue of being able to accelerate this solution and put it into practice. Marketplace. We strongly believe that this sustainable model can become a public utility in the country. The resistance of producers is still very great, and many of them are not looking at the soil, and in this way even causing great degradation.

The farmer has difficulty knowing or knowing his numbers. Imagine planting ten crops and nine of them yielding losses? These are real cases. Our technology park is concerned with working within the gate, where things really happen, and that is where we need to achieve transformational sustainability. Before the concierge everything is fine. A seed, for example, today is practically a technological chip where companies can already place two essential factors: productivity and plant defense.

Speaking of productive potential, with the technologies we have today it is possible to reach 180 bags of soybeans, for example per hectare, it is viable and genetics already establishes this. However, if we take these 180 bags, where are the potential losses? Around 78/sc are lost due to water deficit, and this now drops to 102/sc. In management, which is the planting and plantability part, an average of 53/sc is lost, due to errors and adjustment problems, because the planters are archaic, apart from some other correlated factors. So we reach 49/sc who don't pay the bill. Simple things can change that.

For example, in work carried out in partnership with Embrapa, using contour planting, we managed to retain five times more water than planting downhill. These are basic changes, but they generate many results. Who is the largest water storer in the world? The soil, if it has difficulty irrigating, the soil infiltrates. Today, one of the problems is that people use subsoilers and scarifiers a lot, which destroys the soil microbiology that has already been created.

The soil has memory, it knows exactly what it is receiving, what it can give back. We usually carry out tests in these areas, using organic matter, and with this, Embrapa managed, after 20 years of study, to detect three enzymes that can really tell whether the soil is alive or not. These are things within the transformational sustainability model that we want to work on and communicate. Always anchored at Embrapa.

Added to all this, thinking in a more macro way, the efficient use of water combined with soil conservation are related to food security. For example, some Asian countries are already facing hunger, European countries are not hungry, but they have problems with the cost of food, that is, financial access and it is very complicated. These two examples are reasons enough to prove our responsibility to produce more, in the same area, without cutting down trees, which is why our internal vision is to be more macro.

You need to go further

In this vision of transformational sustainability, we seek to go further by also focusing on the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). For those who are unfamiliar, the acronym was created in 2015, when the UN proposed to its member countries a new sustainable development agenda for the next 15 years, consisting of 17 goals, a joint effort of countries, companies, institutions and civil society. . The goals seek to ensure human rights, end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, act against climate change, as well as address other of the greatest challenges of our times. .

We realize that all of these 17 sustainable development goals are connected to agriculture. That's why we associate them with transformational sustainability in the integrated relationship between soil, seed, fertilizer, plant and food, that is, this broader vision that is where we operate and the impacts they will cause.