Agrovista MD sees changed future for agronomists

Agronomy is changing fast as the industry adapts to new technology, regulations and the need to farm sustainably against a difficult commercial background. Chris Clayton, Agrovista’s new MD, tells 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 explains. A sizable part of the business will continue in this area, but there is set to be a big change of role for Agrovista’s agronomists. “For future agronomists, the trainees that we’ve 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. It will have to broaden its offer. I’ve spent 25 years with IC, then Zeneca and Syngenta. 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’re losing established products through the reregistration process. That industry lifeblood, if you like, is being switched off. “The consequence of this is that there is more established, generic chemistry available. It’s a different position and it’s difficult to predict the political landscape of the future. It certainly makes our strategic planning a challenging task.” Mr Clayton points out that his old employer 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 says.

“The future’s seen within the seeds and traits. We have to be cognisant of that. That’s why, as Agrovista, we see a need to be far more involved in the seeds side of the business. That’s 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 we’ve got something that becomes interesting to the grower.” He stresses 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 says. “We’ve 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’re coming to the end of their careers. Over the next 5 to 10 years there’s going to be a big changing of the guard. We’ve made a big investment for that. It’s critical that they are the agronomists of the future, not the agronomists of the past. “They’re 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 interesting that there is a small proportion of early adopter farmers who’ve really gone into the precision and cloud space. They get a lot of airtime and everybody says, ‘wow, look at what they’re doing.’ I would say that the vast majority of growers are struggling to understand what this can bring to them, to understand where the benefit is and the payback of them investing the time and effort to upskill themselves in the precision area. That’s where we can help, because there’s 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 turning them into usefu,l 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 and turns it into information the grower can use pragmatically in his day-to-day managing of the crop. I think we’re only scratching the surface at the moment.” Many UK farmers are trying precision techniques with varying results. “If you look at the overall P&L [profit & loss] for precision agriculture in the UK it’s very much in the red,” he says. “Within that, there are a few individuals and a few companies who are very much in the black.

Article taken from Farm Business Magazine
By Chris Lyddon