Report on a World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit
The 2021 World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit has come to an end, and our SoilMate Team is extremely lucky for having this opportunity to be a part of this global event.
The event has become virtual and made it possible to gather more than 1500 people from all over the world on the same platform in the meantime on 9–10 March. The 2021 World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit became the biggest event to date.
Overview
The World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, as an international networking event, is usually held three times a year in London, São Paulo, and San Francisco. However, due to the Coronavirus outbreak, the summit went online in 2020.
In 2021, the event welcomed 1504 delegates (76% — CEO and Directors) and 130 speakers (35% Agribusinesses and Food Growers) from 49 countries.
Within each of the themed tracks — sustainability and digital transformation all the participants had an opportunity to join the debate sessions or interviews on specific sub-themes, like innovation to unlock a sustainable future, enabling a climate positive food future, digital future of agriculture, and making agriculture smarter.
The eight global forum has been available on a digital platform that allowed both educational and networking opportunities. Everyone could join the plenary sessions, interactive roundtables debates, participate in high-level panel discussions, Q&A sessions, share their innovations in a start-up showcase arena.
The sessions with lots of discussion on these vital AgriTech topics were hosted by the leaders of major agricultural companies, like Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, The Mosaic Company, Tenacious Ventures.
To make the online event as comfortable as the offline, the participants were allowed to schedule 1–1 video meetings.
Speakers and insights
The summit provided for substantive discussion on the key topics: sustainable crop inputs, automation, robotics, carbon tracking, soil health, regenerative farming, plant & animal pandemics, and many more.
At the very beginning of the summit, the US secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, said:
“The vision of our department is to improve the productivity of agriculture. Today, in 2021, we are using science and data to expand access to more productivity, which means growing more and raising faster. Now we need to use science and data-driven decision-making to expand access to productivity.”
Nowadays, in the digital age, data is available everywhere. However, the full range of its benefits has yet to be realized in agriculture. Many speakers expressed their appreciation for the new technologies for collecting data for precise farm management. The latest technologies deliver innovative solutions for high-level farm activities and output.
We heard from the Head of Bayer’s R&D department, Bob Reither, that since the further development of machine learning using computer learning software and machine learning to identify patterns, the image processing technology has significantly improved.
“The science is there, and we also want to support the science,” — mentioned Bob.
Throughout the conference, we also look beyond the current digital transformation, which had just begun to the future of agriculture.
An Agriculture sphere will be more complex than the current one. Still, farmers will easily manage it to build a more accurate and cost-effective marketplace using the technology opportunities, which are currently under development.
As half of the sessions were focused on sustainability, we couldn’t avoid sustainability in carbon markets. The speakers discussed the beneficial opportunity of carbon farming — the more carbon is sequestrated to the environment, the fewer carbon emissions it causes.
They concluded that the cooperation between manufacturers and innovators gives a great chance to improve the soil quality and carbon sequestration.
Conclusion
It’s been such a productive two days — 20 different events, extra networking, and countless amounts of new resources and data.
Thanks to this powerful platform, all the participants had a high engagement level like the full-fledged event during the pandemic.
Since the world is facing many issues, like food insecurity, the necessity to shorten the supply chain, global warming, and the damaging impact of the pandemic, such events are needed for developing new approaches, technologies and solving our current and future problems in AgTech. It is a perfect opportunity to bring together all the industry leaders in a virtual space and allow them to cooperate without barriers.
SoilMate Team is incredibly grateful for this conference and the chance to explore the possibility of applying our knowledge and technologies for implementing digital infrastructure in a sustainable future.
