Syngenta launches SmartFarm – to grow more food and protect our environment
Syngenta, the global agricultural business announces the launch of its SmartFarm brand to the agriculture industry at the annual Agricultural Expo at NAMPO in Bothaville.
According to Antonie Delport, Managing Director of Syngenta, this new sub-brand of Syngenta will further cement Syngenta’s status as a world leader in agribusiness.
“Since its establishment at the end of 2000, Syngenta has positioned itself as providing comprehensive solutions, backed by innovative research and new technology, to maximise yield increases for farmers both local and international. With SmartFarm we’re about to take an even greater leap forward in agriculture,” says Delport.
Delport says that SmartFarm is rather a mindset that aims to encourage our farmers to reconsider and change the way they farm, make decisions, buy products, invest in their crops, and to start doing things in a smarter way. Ultimately it is a driver for farmers to replace conventional methods with a modern, proven approach that will guide and help them in achieving greater harvests.
A Smart Farm is no ordinary farm, it’s beyond extraordinary.
He further adds that SmartFarm is intuitive – where forecasts and yields take their lead from Syngenta’s innovations in Seed and Seed Care. A SmartFarm is intelligent – one that ploughs beyond the cutting edge of Crop Protection into a new field of opportunity called the Cloud and the Internet of things. It’s also a collaborative farm – where any dialogue about growing better food, growing more food, improving quality of life and protecting the environment, is not a monologue about what we’ll do tomorrow, but a vibrant conversation about what Syngenta and farmers all over the world are doing together today.
With Syngenta’s products, programmes and progressive innovations that fall under the SmartFarm umbrella, farming smarter is the future of agriculture, and available to all farmers today. It offers an ingenious lease on the way we farm and the special relationship we have with the land and our crops.
“It’s this primal partnership between a farmer and his land that has nurtured and sustained the growth of civilisations since the dawn of time. Yet, the global food system is soon to enter a new era – one with daunting challenges. There will be an unprecedented combination of pressures over the next few decades. Global population size will increase and competition for land, water and energy will intensify, while the effects of climate change will become increasingly apparent,” says Delport.
So what are we going to do come 2030 when we sit with a global population of more than eight billion people? Will there be enough food to feed the world? Only by taking this vast, green continuum to the next level, and the next, can we make our farms, crops and land far more efficient and ensure the sustainability of the world’s future population.
If it’s our land and crops that will create our planet’s future, it’s our farmers who will drive us to it. Therefore, Smart Farming is no longer an option; it’s become an imperative.
According to Delport, the model of agricultural production that predominates today is not suitable for the new food security challenges of the 21st century. Sadly too many growers employ methods that cannot prevent the degradation of soils and the loss of biodiversity, as opposed to growers who make use of farming methods that conserve the soil as an important resource and adopt methods which mitigate the effects of climate change.
The industrial food production path we've been on has come to a dead end. Now there’s a new vocabulary, one that emphasises the importance of becoming intelligent, inspired, collaborative, global, risk-wise, ambitious, protective and nurturing – all encapsulated in the concept of Smart Farming.
Issued by Idea Engineers on behalf of Syngenta South Africa
Contact: Isadora Isaacs
Tel: 011 803 0030
E-mail: isadora@ideaengineers.co.za
