The power of social media and new technologies to help agribusiness better position itself in urban society

According to the Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA), last year, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of Brazilian agribusiness increased by 24.31%, compared to the previous year, and had a share of 26.6% in GDP of the country – in 2019, it was 20.5%. This represented, in monetary terms, almost BRL 2 trillion – Brazilian GDP totaled BRL 7.45 trillion in 2020.

Brazilian agriculture in 2021 fed 1.5 billion people that is one in 4 people in the world consumed our food, all of this in a very competitive and above all sustainable agriculture. We use only 30.2% of our territory for agriculture: 21.2% for pastures, 1.2% for planted forests, and 7.8% for agriculture. We have 66.3% of our country still protected and of this total 25.6% are preserved by the farmers themselves, thanks to modern and active environmental legislation.

Image 1: Use of the land in Brazil

We have a farmer whose average age is getting younger and younger, which facilitates the adoption of technologies, bringing greater productivity, greater environmental preservation, and greater social impact to all those involved. The ESG subject is increasingly on the agenda of our agribusiness, and this has become a primer followed by all of us players in the sector.

The big problem is that we are not able to inform and communicate with society about how we produce food, and we must fight lies and untruths about how we always do this production. The discussions are made senseless and immature, and the man responsible for this is the democratization of social media.

And unlike many, who want to silence social media to control the narrative, I am in favor of this democratization, which gives everyone the ability to express their opinion, as I am doing here in this article.

But how to improve our influence and how can we break our “bubble” to reach our population with facts and data. I always see city people criticizing farmers for using agrochemicals and forgetting that we are one of the biggest consumers of over-the-counter medicines, I see city people criticizing how we preserve our forests without charging the authorities about the open sewers that run in our cities, that is, people from large centers dominate communication and it is much easier to accuse than to have a more critical view of oneself.

In a recent study, I was curious to know how many followers agribusiness companies in Brazil had on their social media, I took the largest crop protection companies, the largest cooperatives, and the largest distributors, as shown in the tables below.

If we take the sum of all the followers of these 3 sectors, we will have 11.3 million people and that is certainly with people who follow several of these companies like me, who follow most of them, that is, this number is much smaller than that reflected in these frames.

Just for the sake of comparison, there is a great digital influencer in Brazil that has children and teenagers in its audience, a platform with 43 million followers on YouTube alone, which is almost 4 times the total number of people from the main agribusiness players, and many sometimes without any authority to talk about agribusiness makes videos and publications criticizing our sector without any scientific study and throws untruths and false accusations in the sector. As an example, we have several articles about Brazil being the largest consumer of agrochemicals in the world without knowing that here, unlike countries with temperate climates, we have 2 to 3 crops per year, that is, the fight against pests, diseases, and weeds, is much more difficult, or the fallacies about the increase in CO2 from flatulence in our cattle.

As much as we do competitive and sustainable agriculture, it will be difficult to fight this narrative of disinformation and attack on our business. It would not be difficult for any digital influencers to research the work of Embrapa, Universities such as USP/ESALQ, UNESP or listen to authorities such as Dr. Evaristo de Mirando or Dr. Gustavo Spadotti who have images, data, and know Brazilian agribusiness like no one else in the world and in helping to publicize how thriving, competitive and the most brilliant sector of our economy is, but misinforming and attacking is much easier and seems to reverberate more.

My conclusion is that today “we evangelize those who are already evangelized”, that is, we talk about how we produce, how we respect nature, and the rules established for those who already know agribusiness. Sometimes the communication we want to impose can sound heavy to those who do not belong to the sector, like what a major television network did here in Brazil: “Agro is pop. Agro is tech” which I thought was fantastic, for being in the sector, but there can be a bit of prepotency or arrogance.

Sometimes out of malice or ideology, people attack our agribusiness. We have a productive agribusiness, we are in the top 10 in most of the foods consumed by the planet, only the farmer preserves 25% of the national territory and where we have agriculture, we have the highest HDI indexes in Brazil (Green and blue on the map), and the lower unemployment rates are also found in these areas.

But what to do in the face of all these adversities we face when communicating with the market?

- Increase our presence on social media and seek simpler, more transparent, and less arrogant communication

- Interact more with these digital influencers and seek their support and support with facts and data

- Greater interaction with schools showing the impacts of our agriculture on the economy, environment, and social aspects.

- Greater dissemination and help from the sector in the distribution of enlightening books such as Nicholas Vital, Marcos Fava, and  Xico Graziano, which should be in all Brazilian schools. The books are true encyclopedias and in simple language to help understand our agribusiness.

We cannot wait for someone or some “divine” is to come and help with this, we need, as actors in the sector, to mobilize and start acting, and here I report an example of what happened in 2017, where a group of friends who work in the agro sector, at the same time find it very difficult to obtain relevant and impartial information about good practices in agriculture, created YouAgro.( https://www.youagro.com)

This agribusiness startup is a social network, where users can exchange professional experiences and have access to relevant content. The community, research institutions, and companies share relevant information in an impartial and collaborative way and its main objective is to offer a safe environment focused on what really matters, finding ways to obtain good profitability in its activity, in a sustainable way.

Although people have occupied spaces and spend countless hours within social networks, the flow of irrelevant content is very intense. In addition to chain letters and fake news, we are constantly bombarded by purchase ads, suggestions, and data collection. Instead of calmly browsing and really connecting and exchanging experiences, networks have become environments for inviting likes, comments, and likes that really have no meaning.

The world is increasingly connected to how our food is produced and the likely impacts on the environment and rural communities. Thus, consumers, students, farmers, researchers, and professionals in the food production chain need to be tuned in and well-informed.

As this group of professionals or renowned writers that I mentioned here, our role is to bring the best information to our community, through the most diverse channels and formats, and social media and new technologies are strong allies for this purpose.