Swiss agritech company xFarm Technologies is merging with Checkplant, a Brazilian company that specialises in solutions for field management and monitoring. Brazi is a leading producer of coffee, sugarcane, soybeans, cereals, and legumes, whose agribusiness export value amounted to around $160 billion in 2024.
xFarm was born from the merger of xFarm and Farm Technologies in 2021. It offers apps for farm management, connected sensors, support in digital transformation projects, algorithms applied to agriculture, and training activities for the whole sector. It supports the work of 500,000+ farms belonging to more than 100 supply chains on over 8.3 million hectares in more than 100 countries worldwide.
I spoke to Matteo Cunial, co-founder and CRO of xFarm Technologies to learn more.
Inceasing resiliency against climate change
According to Cunial, the biggest challenges facing farmers today are “climate change, input costs, the need to reduce the impact of agriculture and to make farming systems more resilient.”
“Farmers around the world are facing enormous challenges today, and our goal has always been to be their ally on a global scale.”
xFarm’s technologies help by making farming more efficient through decision support systems that help save valuable resources and help farmers predict pest trends through predictive modelling and by providing the tools to implement and monitor regenerative agriculture practices along supply chains.
xFarm provides farmers and supply chains with a complete system to collect primary data at field level and support agronomic decisions through decision support systems (DSS) that increase the efficiency of input use.
It has also developed tools to quantify impact with a focus on emission sources, quantify carbon sequestration in regenerative agriculture projects at the supply chain level, and to monitor biodiversity-related projects.
xFarm Technologies already has a Brazilian team spread across the country, working on numerous projects focused on traceability, regenerative agriculture and MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, Verification).
Cunial shared:
“In addition to traditional monitoring, we offer MRV technologies to monitor the implementation of regenerative agriculture practices via satellite.
This makes it easier to verify that the practices have been implemented and to estimate the amount of carbon sequestered.”
MRV ensures that all the steps planned in a GHG mitigation project are carried out properly.
The company is also developing a business intelligence platform to monitor agronomic trends on a continental scale via satellite, providing insights such as yield forecasts, crop rotation forecasts and optimal harvest dates.
Scaling smart farming: The push for digital transformation in agritech
I come from Australia, where farms are big. Anna Creek Station, the largest farm in Australia, spans 6 million acres, making it larger than countries such as Israel, El Salvador, and Belize. They are early adopters of digital transformation, relying on technologies like satellites to remain operational.
Farms sizes in Brazil vary but include large-scale farms in regions like Mato Grosso, such as Bom Futuro farm, which spans 555,000 acres for soybeans alone and also grows cotton and corn on additional land, and El Tejar. This Argentine-owned operation farms over 1 million acres in Brazil's Mato Grosso state.
While xFarm Technologies has experience working with small and medium-sized farms and supply chain projects, the Checkplant team is very strong in working with farms larger than 1000 hectares.
Checkplant, which operates in key areas for Brazilian agriculture, such as Mato Grosso, Bahia, Paraná and Goias, has a significant track record and portfolio of large farms among its customers, covering 50 per cent of the total area of cotton plantations and 11 per cent of the total area of soybean plantations in Brazil.
Checkplant has digitised more than 4 million hectares in Brazil and is one of the market leaders; xFarm has worked on extensive plots of land in Brazil and some important regenerative agriculture projects.
However, Cunial asserts:
“There are over 91 million hectares of cultivated land in Brazil, so there is still much to be done to improve digitisation and increase the number of connected farms.”
The partnership paves the way for xFarm to extend its reach into Latin America and also allows Checkplant to further expand and improve the services it has been providing for over twenty years.
According to Cunial:
"We will now be able to scale our operations much faster in Brazil, and implement everything we are doing in the European market to help our B2B customers cover their entire supply chain and ensure greater traceability and sustainability, also through regenerative agriculture practices."
André Cantarelli, CEO of Checkplant, shared:
"From our first interactions with the xFarm Technologies’ team, I saw the potential to take this project to the next level, seeing opportunities that we hadn't been able to achieve on our own.
Now, we're expanding and advancing our mission to deliver innovative solutions that transform agriculture.
As a single company, we're better positioned to serve farmers across all segments with tools that improve efficiency, promote sustainability and create value at every stage of production.”
Lead image: xFarm. Photo: uncredited.
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