Innovation helps Brazilian farmers feed the world
16 February 2022, Brazil: Roberson Marczak is ADAMA’s Innovation Manager for Brazil and Latin America. He has been with the company for 11 years, but before that he worked in digital innovation for a number of non-agricultural companies in pharmaceuticals and electronic engineering in Europe and Brazil.
“My experience in other industries and background allows me to look at agricultural issues from a different perspective, combing technologies from other areas and focusing on the solution and farmer’s pain points.”
Roberson’s role is to develop new AgTech services for Brazil and other South American countries to enhance and complement the use of agrochemicals. He believes this approach will only increase over time and drive the AgChem industries through new challenges, combining chemicals and digital technologies.
“Agriculture is living a digital transformation, where sensors, algorithms and artificial intelligence are becoming part of daily routine of farmers. Companies that focus solely on crop protection products will find it difficult to survive in the near future.”
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One AgTech service that Roberson and his team has recently launched is Adama Air, an aerial spraying system which avoids the drift of agrochemicals and increases the product penetration in the crop, enhancing the agronomic efficacy of the aerial spraying. This service has a huge impact in terms of environment preservation and best agronomic practices.
Roberson believes the use of new technologies will only increase and be available to a greater range of farmers. An example of the widespread use of technology by a wide range of Brazilian farmers is ADAMA Alvo. It is an app that provides a database and image bank of crop pests and diseases allowing growers to diagnose problems in the field. It has been downloaded by more than 200,000 users and is already available for soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton, sugarcane and coffee crops.
“With the progress of digital technologies, farmers have nowadays not only agrochemicals products to support them to increase their yields, they can also count with tools like imagery, sensor, drones and other tools which will bring agriculture to a new level of productivity and sustainability “.
CLIMA APP
One of the most successful AgTech services developed by Roberson’s team is ADAMA Clima, which provides vital weather forecasting information allowing growers to plan planting, protection and harvesting of their crops. So far more than 500 ADAMA Clima stations have been installed. ADAMA’s dedication to innovation in Brazil has being awarded as the most innovative agro-company in the last 6 editions of the prestigious national innovation in agriculture accolade presented by financial newspaper Valor Econômico.
“The future of agriculture is totally related to the agronomic data extracted from the fields and with the historical information from past seasons. Combining this data with the agronomic knowledge will allow ADAMA to build intelligent algorithms to support farmers taking the best decisions for their crops. I believe that is our main challenge: how to transform data into valuable information for farmers,” concludes Roberson.
