Article taken from Agronomist & Arable magazine
By Chris Lyddon
The agronomists' working world is changing fast, as changes are forced on the industry by changing technology, changing regulation and the need to farm sustainably against a difficult commercial background. Chris Clayton, new MD of Agrovista, told Chris Lyddon how he sees the future.
Chris Clayton became managing director of Agrovista just under a year ago, coming in from Syngenta. It's given him time to consider how one of Britain's leading agronomy firms will have to adapt to face the challenges ahead. ""Our core business is the provision of technical agronomic advice to growers based mainly around their crop protection programmes," he said. A sizable part of the business will continue in this area, but there is set to be a big change of role of Agrovista's agronomists. ""What I can see clearly, is that for the future agronomists; the trainees that we have taken on over the last few years, their role will be very different and will have to embrace different skill sets.”Agrovista will not sustain its business level in the future by only focusing on advice around chemical applications and chemical agronomy," he said. ""It will have to broaden its offer. I have spent 25 years with ICI and then Zeneca and then Syngenta," he explained. ""The innovation rate in the agchem sector has slowed and is not likely to get any faster. The regulatory hurdles are very difficult, particularly in Europe. We are losing established products through the re-registration process. That industry lifeblood, if you like, is being switched off. ""The consequence of this is that there is more and more established, generic chemistry avail-able," he said. ""It is a different position and it is difficult to predict the political landscape of the future. It certainly makes our strategic planning a challenging task! He also pointed out that his old employers and its competitors in the manufacturing world are investing heavily in the seed sector. ""In real terms, the amount of R&D going into traditional crop protection is going backwards," he said.
SEEDS AND TRAITS
""The future is seen within the seeds and traits. We have to be very cognisant of that. That is why, as Agrovista, we see a need to be far more involved in the seeds side of the business. That is why we invested in Ebbage Seeds in December last year, which gives us the opportunity to plug seeds into our technical development programmes and work variety across agronomy programmes that deliver the benefits to the grower. ""If we can tie that to an end market as well then you've got something that becomes interesting to the grower," he said. He stressed the importance of the people in Agrovista. ""The key thing on people is that we at Agrovista have year on year taken on between six and 10 graduates/ people coming into the industry (maybe ex-farm managers)," he said. ""We have invested heavily in people. Many people in our industry came in the 1980s when the whole crop protection market was really taking off and they are coming up to the end of their careers," he pointed out. ""Over the next five to 10 years there is going to be a big changing of the guard. We've made a big investment for that. It is also very critical that they are the agronomists of the future and not the agronomists of the past.
""They are embracing end markets, precision agriculture, all the IT space, because the farmer of the future is going to demand that the next generation are far more IT and cloud-savvy than now. ""It's very interesting to note that there is a small proportion of early adopter farmers who have really gone into the precision and cloud space," he said. ""They get a lot of airtime and everybody says, 'wow, look at what they are doing.' I would say that the vast majority of growers are struggling to under-stand what this can bring to them, to understand where the benefit is and the payback of them investing the time and effort to upskil themselves in the precision area That is where we can really heir because there is a huge amount of data that might be gathered from various sources, yield mapping of combines, n-sensors, satellites, you name it. There are mountains of data but actually turning that into useful simple pragmatic information that helps you manage your farm better is the holy grail. ""We need to come up with a simple, pragmatic system that takes the data, turns it into information that the grower can use pragmatically in his day to day managing of the crop. I think we are only scratching the surface at the moment."" To date, many UK farmers are trying precision techniques with varying results. ""If you look at the overall P&L for precision agriculture in the UK it is very much in the red," he said. ""Within that, there are a few individuals and a few companies who are very much in the black. ""It becomes very difficult with the current farming economics," he said. Difficult economics made it difficult to justify investment in new techniques. Even so, the need to achieve greater sustainability will leave growers with little choice.