Feed the world

Agritech is revolutionising what we eat and the way we eat it. It needs to: the planet will suffer a critical food shortage unless it does. We spoke to Intel director turned agribusiness evangelist Fernando Martins to talk synthetic meats, IoT, deforestation, innovative ecosystems and the future of sustainable farming

The first great human revolution was not a movement. Nor was it a military adventure or a dramatic cultural uprising. It was crops and cows, arable land, chickens and pigs. The first great transformation in human society was in agriculture; as soon as our loincloth-wearing ancestors realised they didn’t have to spend all day bounding after wild beasts in order to survive, but could instead settle in one place to grow crops and selectively breed animals, human culture was changed forever.

When, over the last 200 years, advances in medicine began to untether human existence from the diseases that had hitherto kept its numbers in check, the world’s population exploded. It quadrupled in the 20th century alone, and a vast industrialisation of agriculture was required to make sure it didn’t starve.

Today, however, agriculture’s capacity to keep pace is under severe threat.

While 50% of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture — 77% for livestock and the remaining 23% for crops — by the year 2050 it is estimated Earth’s population will have increased by another 2.5 billion to approach 10 billion. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has warned that food productivity will need to increase by 60% to meet the demand.

How do you do that in the face of global warming, deforestation, and land simply running out? The WEF states that “nearly 800 million people are undernourished while two billion are micronutrient deficient and two billion more people overweight or obese. At the same time, food production, transportation, processing and waste are putting unsustainable strain on environmental resources”.

So once again agriculture is going through a revolution, born out of necessity to improve sustainability. While media, retail, transportation and automotive have embraced new tech, farming was the last of the large industries to adopt. But now it’s on board, the need for acceleration is clear — and it’s starting to happen.

From impossible burgers using plant-based proteins that cook in the same way as meat, to using less space to produce more food through machine learning and big data, agritech is becoming big business. It’s the future of not just what we eat, but how we eat.

One of the very smartest minds in agritech is Brazilian-born engineer Fernando Martins (above), who took the leap into the sector after recognising its seismic importance while still president of the Brazilian arm of Intel in 2011. A prodigious and varied career had preceded that moment, including as global director of strategic technology planning at Intel in the US.

Prior to that, as a young engineer he had helped fix the famously wayward guidance system of the US military’s Patriot missile system, before going on to play a role in the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and registering 27 patents in the early development of video encoding .

“I think the shift to agribusiness was just a natural new interest,” he says. “I developed a new interest! That has often been the case in my career. I’ve been very curious since I was six years old.”

At Intel, he developed the company’s Digital Agro strategy and launched the Center for Innovation in Agribiz. After leaving, he became CEO of AgroTools, a young Sao Paulo company that aimed to use satellites to monitor land in Brazil used to graze cattle. Around 70% of all meat produced by Brazil now passes through the company’s system, which issues social-environmental certifications to protect against Amazon deforestation.

Martins is also a shareholder and former director of Solinftec, another fast-growing Brazilian agritech company that provides end-to-end IoT and data processing solutions to big agriculture.

“We have less and less deforestation in Brazil caused by the expansion of the agribusiness frontier”

AgroTools and Solinftec are just two of a portfolio of interests Martins has accumulated in the burgeoning sector, and are just two among more than a thousand startups emerging from Brazil’s vibrant agritech scene. Martins’ impressive body of work means he has become globally recognised as an evangelist for the digital transformation of agribusiness.

“The principal challenge is to feed the planet, right?” he says.

“We need to do that with a concern for the environment, we need to increase productivity without increasing deforestation. We need to increase the productivity per square meter. To be able to do that we need to be cognisant of the challenges. There is global warming, the climate is changing, the soil is degraded to a great extent already.

“We have issues with water — there’s not enough water in many regions of the world. China, for example, has a shortage; they’re a big desert surrounded by cities, so a lot of China’s imports are driven by a lack of water.”

To tackle these issues, in 2009 the WEF launched its New Vision for Agriculture, which holds that “to meet the world’s needs, sustainable agriculture must simultaneously deliver food security, environmental sustainability and economic opportunity.”

Martins explains: “[The WEF] postulates that there’s three things we need to get there. One is new technologies. In their 2018 report they singled out 12 technologies that are important, from things starting from all the science fiction — alternative protein synthesis, impossible meats and insect protein — all the way to best practices in precision agriculture, the use of microbiomes, and so on.

“The second thing is really economic opportunities to the value chain. You have to have technologies and economic opportunities for everybody along the value chain.

“The third thing is the existence of an innovation ecosystem. So an innovation ecosystem that will have start-ups working on the development of the technologies, that will have corporations and channels of distribution such that those technologies get productised and distributed, and the government research funds applied all in the same vector. So this innovation ecosystem is very important.”

Like with any digital transformation, changes in agriculture and the world’s food supply chain will be driven because there is an economic imperative to do it — not just because of a social need. As ever, money keeps the world turning — and fed.

“The ecosystem that I’m very proud of being part of, that solved to a great extent that decoupling of deforestation from productivity, is an ecosystem that looks at the retailers and convinces them to become activists. The retailer will say, ‘I will not purchase meat that was produced on land that has been a recent target of deforestation’. Social environmental certificates allow for that visibility.

“There’s a beautiful graph [below] that shows that before the use of digital environmental certificates the growth in meat production in Brazil was tied to deforestation. After the implementation of this policy, deforestation went down and meat production went up. Completely decoupled. When you have these kinds of policies and tools in place, economic forces push the farmers and ranchers to use different technologies.

“It becomes economically viable to start confinement, to start better genomics, instead of just deforestation. So better practices increase productivity and you have an example here of a success story, where we have less and less deforestation in Brazil caused by the expansion of the agribusiness frontier.”

Ten years ago, deforestation in Brazil was at 24,000 sq km a year; a year ago it had reduced to 8,000. The election of Jair Bolsorano as president of Brazil in January 2019 has caused problems, but the signs are still encouraging.

“What has happened since the new president here in Brazil, is that he’s loosened up a little bit on the government controls and that has created an uptick on deforestation,” Martins says. “So what was a trend of going down became a trend of going up again, but we’re still below 10,000, which is less than half of what it was ten years ago. But 8,000 sq km is a lot of forest; we’ve got to do much better than that.”

A great example of tying sustainability to profit was early work carried out in Brazil by Solinftec. The company set about instrumenting all of the equipment used in the production of sugarcane — one of the country’s most important crops. It connected everything — harvesters and their attendant collection trucks, the larger trucks that move the sugarcane to mills, and finally the mill operations themselves.

“All of these things entail complex queuing theory,” says Martins. “You have different logistics every day: the number of trucks, the number of harvesters, the front lines that require change. The point is that you have a very expensive capital investment in the mill, so you can’t have that mill stop for a shortage of sugarcane. But on the other hand you don’t want big lines where you’re going to have your capital investment waiting in trucks just sitting there waiting for the mill to process, so you want to optimise that.

“So every day a new equation for queuing is solved, the number of trucks is recalculated, and instead of having a couple of trucks, one behind the other following the harvester, you just have one. Sensors will tell me when that truck is full, and we call that the single line of transportation, which is where you have just one line of trucks for the whole operation. The trucks get dispatched on demand, and the demand is generated by the other machines. So you can see this is a true Internet of Things system, where machines talk to machines and they make the decisions. All of this dialogue is implemented by the machines.”

Apply the same principle to all forms of harvesting, and suddenly you have a system that not only provides a better margin to the grower, but it’s also a more sustainable system because less fuel is used.

Despite dire warnings of global food shortages over the next 30 years, Martins remains resolutely optimistic that the challenge will be met. “I’m actually very optimistic, because there’s nothing more primal than food,” he says. “We have never statistically had such long lives. We have never eaten as well as we are today. And it’s only going to get better.

“If we look at the technologies that are still to be unleashed, we are going to see tremendous productivity. We’re going to have well-balanced diets with nutrigenomics, which is softer scaffolding to help people decide what to eat, and how people get visibility on what they’re eating.”

He also predicts that we are at the advent of impossible meats — such as the Impossible Burger which made headlines around the world a few years ago. It uses a plant-based patty that cooks in the same way as meat, made using haem — a compound containing iron that’s abundant in animal muscle. Because it’s made from plants, the environmental footprint is much smaller than if it were made from beef. Meatless meat is becoming increasingly mainstream, and Martin believes this trend will accelerate.

“If you look at the cold chain, and the logistics required to move beef from central Brazil to Novosibirsk in Russia where it will be ultimately consumed, it’s very complicated to keep containers frozen with the cold chain preserved all the way through to Europe. And it’s very, very expensive. You have to have electricity, you have to have diesel being spent to keep the container cold, and so on. There’s loss — meat has problems! It’s an animal, you have fecal matter in non-zero percentages. So it’s very complex.

“Now if you compare that with the new technology, and you have a new factory that produces protein that tastes like it, with zero cholesterol, no fecal matter, no need for a complex cold chain because you can transport grain to the destination and have the factory there, there’s a lot of economic advantage. You’re going to see economic forces pushing towards synthetic protein and people will most likely adopt that.”

Martins also sees big changes to farms over the next few decades.

“We’re going to see farms that manage themselves,” he says. “We’re going to see what I call autonomic agriculture, so the farm will fix itself, it will look at the weather and decide to spray or not, and the sprayers will go to the fields and spray without human interaction. That’s going to happen.

“I can see that in 30 years we’ll have a lot more progress towards autonomic agriculture, with a lot more data being collected by those machines and data flowing through systems like blockchain to get to you with trust. We can dream a lot of things, but I definitely think a lot of those items will be a part of agriculture 30 years from now.”

The world is counting on it.