Guest commentary by Olmo Axayacatl Bastida Cañada (Sr. Content Analyst ProducePay)
Agriculture has always been the exclusive territory of lifelong farmers, professionals and field workers. However, as new technologies are reaching the agri-food sector, so do people whose training and experiences are not directly related with the day-to-day operations in the field, but they have huge ideas and opportunities for the agrobusiness.
This situation is not new, historically speaking, agriculture has always given room to innovators and entrepreneurs seeking business opportunities; However, in recent years the flow has increased significantly and in the following years the trend will continue, so that more and more participants in the production chains will come from other areas of knowledge, not directly related to agriculture.
I began to notice this situation while interviewing agricultural specialists on my podcast, since many of my guests in the last two years are not “natives” of the sector, but rather have other profiles such as: financiers, lawyers, business administrators, engineers in telecommunications and specialists in robotics, automation, artificial intelligence and data science.
The most interesting thing is that these profiles are delivering a new horizon to agriculture because they arrive with a certain ignorance of the sector, especially about the existing limitations, which in return represents an advantage, since they are not conditioned by the normal paradigms of the industry and in addition, they also have tools that allow them to see agriculture from a different perspective. And the more technology is introduced to agriculture, the more specialists from other areas will continue to arrive, because we all know that agricultural production still has a lot of room for the development and implementation of technological innovations, which represents an interesting opportunity for many “outsiders”.
We should also keep in mind that the pandemic demonstrated that we should be closer to the ag sector when another global crisis strikes, taking its resilience into consideration and its export performance stability in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.
In addition, in various regions and in many crops, agricultural technification is still minimal, so there is a huge opportunity for visionaries to develop solutions that meet the needs of growers and that meet certain requirements that will become mandatory in the sector. All of this, taking into account that agriculture is “virgin ground” for innovation and this opens a big space in the market for big companies to emerge.
Wrapping it up, companies and professionals “external” to agriculture are welcome, because we need innovative ideas and solutions, which are complemented with all the experience in the sector; Furthermore, I fervently believe that diversity is one of the keys to success, so the more different profiles set their eyes on agriculture, little by little innovation will cease to be a novelty to become a constant.
