Rodrigo Ramírez, UPL Argentina: “Sell in a sustainable way”

Rodrigo Ramírez, general manager of UPL Argentina, presented the goals of the new company which, following the acquisition of Arysta LifeScience, are projected to become one of the five leading global suppliers of solutions for agriculture.

 

"UPL was created to work on open agriculture. This means generating relationships with all links, even those that we have not traditionally managed," said Ramírez.

 

"The Yuyo Colorado (Amaranthus quitensis), which is only one of the resistant weeds, is affecting 13 out of 33 million hectares farming land in Argentina, and we are not finding a solution. When you have that kind of problem, you have to face it in a different way, especially for sustainable agriculture over time," said Ramírez.

 

The company not only promotes a disruptive change in weed control strategy, but also has become the first phytosanitary company to target its own business model. UPL takes the focus of chemical control as a tactic of weed management, and also proposes thinking beyond the farm, pointing to tactics that work on larger territorial scales.

 

Ramírez pointed out that from UPL, "We decided to support the RAVIT project - Red Agropecuaria de Vigilancia Tecnológica - through which we are already monitoring one and a half million hectares. The amount of information that we are taking out of there allows us to understand that the solutions we have to give are not the ones we were thinking about, but we have to go the other way, in addition to the process technology, we best return to the agronomy, to those agronomic practices, such as the cultures of services".

 

"We have one or two generations of professionals who developed in a single technology, that controlled everything, but now it is not over. You have to do all the learning again, the experienced old ones have value again, "said Ramirez.

 

"We all want to be the first to win and it's not like that. We sell herbicides and we are very happy that more and more products are being used, but until famers can not spend US$ 200 or 300 in controlling the weeds and there won't be any more business. So we want to continue selling, but in a sustainable way," noted Ramírez.