Did you know that today farmers achieve ONLY 50% of the result they could achieve, even using the same technologies? Why? Mostly because of a lack of access to knowledge and information that would help them make better decisions.
The way to access this knowledge or information to improve their decision is through technical assistance and training, which is traditionally done face-to-face. But the problem is that this is inefficient and, moreover, financially inaccessible for most farmers. In fact, more than 70% of farmers in Latin América are left out of assistance and training schemes. We have the solution for that. We use digital technologies to make technical assistance and training more efficient, accessible, and massive, enabling farmers to be more productive and sustainable.
How do we do that? We developed a digital platform through which farmers and/or technicians can consult experts, receive timely information, get trained, and interact with peers.
We have already achieved a significant impact in Argentina and Uruguay. In 2022 almost 300.000 farmers and technicians benefited from the experts and information provided by Agroconsultas. In addition, more than 300.000 users have participated in the trainings we offer.
We can say that Agroconsultas has a triple impact: (1) More production: There are scientific studies that show that production can be increased by up to 10%, just by receiving assistance and information via SMS (2) More sustainability: We allow optimizing management to reduce environmental impact: more than 70% of questions about pesticides, fertilizers, water and soil management (3) Last but not least, more inclusion: We give the opportunity to any farmer to access experts and first level content.
Today we monetize part of the great value we generate through advertising: large companies place traditional advertisements in Agroconsultas. But in the future, we envision a hybrid business model: smart advertising plus subscriptions for special services.
Where are we going? We want to scale the Argentina and Uruguay experience to other countries, where we can have even more impact given the profile of farmers. For the next 2 years we have our main focus on Colombia and Mexico. This also presents us with the challenge of developing new products to reach smaller farmers, which is another of our objectives.
We want to take Agroconsultas to another level and now is the time: (1) farmers urgently need to be able to increase production and sustainability. (2) there is more and more knowledge to do so and (3) there are less and less barriers and more and more willingness to use digital platforms.
