Is Brazilian agribusiness innovating fast enough? F&S CAP's provocation in Gazeta do Povo

Leonardo Thielo de La Vega, veterinarian, researcher and CEO of F&S CAP, published an opinion piece in Gazeta do Povo, one of Brazil's major newspapers, touching on a point we follow closely at Espresso Labs: the gap between how fast Brazilian agribusiness innovates in the field and on the factory floor, and how fast the systems that manage those operations manage to evolve.

The full article (in Portuguese) is worth reading. Below, a summary of the argument and what it means for anyone buying or building software for agribusiness.

The thesis: agribusiness' next race is against the clock

The starting point is well known: Brazil built one of the world's most competitive agribusiness industries by incorporating advances in genetics, nutrition, animal health, automation, animal welfare and management. What is new is the variable that, according to Leonardo, will decide the game from now on. Less the ability to develop new technologies, more the ability to incorporate them into operations quickly.

The diagnosis of the bottleneck is precise. Today practically everything in the chain generates data: farms, slaughterhouses, feed mills, equipment, quality systems, traceability processes. That information needs to become decisions, and management systems are the bridge. But while production processes move fast, many of those systems still evolve in slow cycles: a need appears, a change is requested, a budget is prepared, the investment is approved and the request joins a development queue.

For decades that model made sense, because developing software was expensive and slow, and every new feature was a project in itself. The article argues that artificial intelligence is changing that economy: AI-assisted development tools reduce the time and cost of creating, testing and shipping features, and what used to take months starts to fit into much shorter cycles.

From isolated projects to platforms in permanent evolution

Two consequences of the article deserve attention from anyone thinking about technology for the agribusiness industry.

First: if the marginal cost of evolving a system drops, treating every need as an isolated project starts to waste time, knowledge and scale, because the pain identified by one agribusiness company is usually the pain of dozens of others. Leonardo cites the concept of high-speed bespoke, discussed by the MIT Sloan Management Review, to name what once looked like a contradiction: customization and speed coexisting.

Second: the systems of the future tend to be less static products, changed through successive individual projects, and more platforms in continuous evolution, where needs identified in the operation feed improvements that benefit a larger set of users.

Closing the piece, the article sums up the new competitiveness ruler for agribusiness: what sets players apart is no longer just the ability to innovate, but how fast innovation becomes results in the operation.

What this changes for software for agribusiness

For us, the article describes exactly the transition we see in software projects for agribusiness: the client's question is no longer just "how much does it cost to build this system?" but also "how long until a new need in my operation becomes a feature in production?".

Answering that second question well requires three things we often defend here: continuous maintenance and evolution instead of projects that end at delivery, AI in the development cycle to shorten the path between demand and production, and real knowledge of the production process, because speed without understanding the business only produces faster rework.

It is the kind of technology Brazil's sophisticated agribusiness has the scale and complexity to pull forward. As the article itself points out, bringing agribusiness companies and Brazilian technology companies closer can turn local needs into solutions capable of competing globally.

Espresso Labs and F&S CAP: partners in agribusiness

F&S CAP is Espresso Labs' partner in projects aimed at the agribusiness industry. The partnership combines what each side does best: F&S CAP brings the technical and scientific knowledge of animal production and the agribusiness industry, and Espresso Labs contributes the software engineering, the squads and the ongoing maintenance that turn that knowledge into systems running in the operation.

If your agribusiness lives the dilemma described in the article, with the operation moving faster than the systems, talk to us.