Spotlight on: Andrea Ghirotti

This time we asked Andrea Ghirotti, the ICL‘s Agronomist and Business Developer from Italy.

What significant changes are you seeing in the agricultural sector?

Over the past 10 years, farmers are involved in an incredible changing process. Today is not possible to work in the agricultural sector by adopting the same practices as in the past. The climate is quite different across the areas and extreme phenomena are becoming usual. Hail, heat waves, strong wind, drought or flooding are now very common all around the regions and farmers need to be aware and ready with solutions and strategies. Then, in Europe, the pesticides restrictions are strongly limiting the plant protection and new solutions have to be adopted.
Geopolitical dynamics are influencing pesticides and fertilizers prices and availability and this process forces farmers in being ready with alternative solutions and a more technical approach.
Last, talking about arable crops, prices are influenced by “commodities” market and are often too low to bear high-tech fertilizers and specialties, so a deep agronomical knowledge is mandatory to set a proper fertilization plan.

Which research or technological innovation do you think will significantly impact farmers?

“Biologicals” has become one of the most popular words in agriculture. On one hand it can be considered business to replace the turnover decrease due to pesticides and fertilizers limitations, but on the other hand it is a promising sector that can help in developing new solutions to face present and future agricultural challenges. New generation biostimulants, microorganism, high tech fertilizers, will be more and more important to keep crop productivity and to improve qualitative parameters through the next years. Also, precision farming is becoming fundamental – in fact farm size is increasing and farmers are becoming more and more interested in systems able to support them in crop management. A typical example is the soil/yield/crop mapping and variable rate distribution with fertilizers or decision support systems (DSS) in plant protection.
In the end, the use of AI in agriculture will impact a lot, especially in taking decision, optimize inputs, reduce operation costs, and increase productivity. The lack of skilled manpower in agriculture is one of the reasons that push this tool faster.