Allan Safieh, founder and CEO of UniSpice and Born Farms, says climate-smart farming means one thing: “protecting the source.”
“Everything we sell starts in the soil of our farms in the Guatemalan highlands, and if that source is not resilient, nothing downstream — the packing, the cold chain, the shelf in Texas or Toronto — can be reliable either,” he says.
Safieh says the company deploys a combination of in-field regenerative agriculture, real-time data, traceability and execution.
“We are not trying to farm against nature,” he says. “We are trying to understand it better, anticipate change earlier and adapt faster than the weather can hurt us.”
This approach treats production plans as living models, projecting demand by week, SKU and customer, and comparing them against in-field data. For instance, if a crop block experiences a heat spike that accelerates growth or a cold night that slows it, Born Farms’ data detects the change before it creates a supply disruption. The company responds by adjusting planting intervals, harvest windows, crews, packing schedules and logistics through its Cerebro platform.
“Data alone does not do this,” Safieh says. “The difference is being able to correlate weather, crop stage, field performance, harvest availability, customer orders and truck capacity inside one decision process.”
In-Field Regenerative Practices
Safieh notes that soil is also a living system. As organic matter, root mass, microbial diversity and soil structure improve, the environment around the root zone becomes more stable — making soil health Born Farms’ primary line of risk management.
“Every point of resilience we build into the soil is one less point of exposure to each individual climate event,” he says. “Over a 30-year family history of growing in the same valleys, that is the most durable investment we have made.”
The goal is to make the soil more capable of doing the work itself through regenerative practices, such as developing crop-root systems, protecting biological activity and managing the root zone. In this way, Safieh says, soil becomes a reservoir rather than a filter.
“The objective is not to eliminate inputs overnight; that would not be honest or realistic,” he says. “It is to remove unnecessary dependency by raising the biological and physical efficiency of the soil, one field at a time.”
Safieh says regenerative production only works for growers if it stays productive, predictable and competitive. This is where data plays a key role, measuring yield history, input cost per hectare and quality at the pack line to “tell us exactly where we can pull back an input without giving anything up at the shelf.”
In-Field Telemetry and Real-Time Decision-Making
For Born Farms, technology helps provide clearer visibility into operations, allowing for faster decisions. In the field, that includes weather data, irrigation information, yield history by block, cost data and production forecasts. It also means utilizing internet-connected traceability, GPS and temperature telemetry on reefer loads, alongside operational dashboards throughout the supply chain.
However, Safieh says, “None of those is impressive by itself.”
For example, he says, a temperature reading is just that, but pairing it with crop stage, irrigation demand, historical yield, harvest timing and more “is where the margin lives.”
“Our philosophy is simple: Technology should simplify the decision, not complicate the farm,” he says. “We cannot control the weather. We can build a system that responds to it faster than the market does. For our customers, that translates into more predictability, real transparency back to the field and a supply chain that gets more reliable, not less, when conditions turn difficult.”
The end goal, he says, is to develop a production system that can absorb climate variability while delivering the quality and consistency retail partners expect. That is where he sees the future of climate-smart farming, “defined less by individual technologies and more by connected intelligence.”
“Weather, soil biology, plant development, irrigation, yields, costs, logistics and market demand will be integrated far more tightly, with artificial intelligence doing much of the correlation that today still depends on experienced people,” he says. “The farms that succeed will be the ones able to turn all of that information into simple, fast decisions in the field.”
Safieh thinks regenerative agriculture will become an economic and supply chain necessity as resilience becomes “one of the most valuable things a grower can offer a buyer.”
“The future farmer will not only grow a crop. The farmer will manage a biological system, a data system and a supply system at the same time — and will be judged on how well the three work together,” he says.
