Mariana Vasconcelos, the daughter of farmers in Brazil—the world’s third-largest food producer—saw firsthand how hard it is for growers to make decisions regarding irrigation, harvesting, and pest control. “They would rely on intuition and their neighbors,” she says. But as climate change led to droughts and irrigation limitations, “that made me want to bring technology to farmers so they could be more resilient.” In 2014, when she was just 23, Vasconcelos founded Agrosmart, which creates software that uses artificial intelligence to make agricultural predictions based on data from the soil, weather conditions, and the genetic properties of the crop. The software, which resides on farmers’ phones, analyzes the raw data collected from sensors and transmitted via satellite or lower-broadband 3G network to make recommendations on everything from seed placement to climate modeling. Brazilian farmers using Agrosmart have increased crop yield and saved up to 40% more water, and the company now monitors more than half a million acres, which is four times more than it did in 2017. Coca-Cola uses Vasconcelos’s tech to monitor fruit farms in Espírito Santo.
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