AI in agribusiness: article by F&S CAP's Leonardo de La Vega featured on Agrimídia

Agrimídia, the portal behind reference publications of the Brazilian animal protein industry such as Suinocultura Industrial and Avicultura Industrial, published in its opinion section the article "What Toyota can teach agribusiness in the AI era" (in Portuguese), by Leonardo Thielo de La Vega, veterinarian, researcher and CEO of F&S CAP.

The bridge between the assembly line and the farm

Leonardo's argument starts from an unusual and precise comparison. Toyota built its industrial leadership by capturing and systematizing its people's knowledge, long before AI existed, and today uses the technology to amplify that asset: generative AI systems that organize decades of senior engineers' knowledge, a global program that brought AI to eleven areas of the operation and concrete results, such as thousands of work hours saved per year in manufacturing.

The article's provocation: Brazilian agribusiness holds one of the world's largest bodies of knowledge in animal production, distributed among veterinarians, animal scientists, agronomists and engineers. The AI opportunity is not to replace that knowledge, but to turn it into intelligence accessible to the whole organization, exactly as the Japanese carmaker has been doing.

The detail that changes everything: biology is not a bolt

The part of the article that speaks most directly to our work is the warning about the nature of AI systems in agriculture. In manufacturing, variables are stable. In animal production, nutrition, environment, health, welfare and genetics change every cycle, and a model that works today can fail tomorrow.

Leonardo's conclusion is a direct challenge to anyone supplying technology to the sector: software partners must commit to permanent, continuous customization, or they will deliver systems that become obsolete as fast as the knowledge they try to capture. Software for agribusiness is not a project with an end date, it is a relationship of constant evolution.

It is hard to describe our view of software development any better. Combining custom builds with continuous maintenance and evolution is the model we have practiced for more than 8 years, with more than 57 systems in operation, and it is what defines a software house for agribusiness worthy of the name: not a vendor that delivers and disappears, but an engineering partner that evolves the system at the pace the field changes.

Espresso Labs and F&S CAP: a software house for Brazilian agribusiness

And here is why this publication matters specially to us: F&S CAP, the company led by Leonardo and focused on innovation for sustainable food production, is a strategic partner and investor of Espresso Labs. Together, the two operate as a software house for agribusiness: F&S CAP brings deep animal production knowledge, defining what to measure and why, and Espresso brings the software engineering, building and evolving custom systems that hold up to the reality of the field, exactly the combination the article argues for.

If your agribusiness operation wants to turn accumulated knowledge into systems that make better decisions, talk to us.