FertiGlobal strategy in Brazil
The Brazilian Connection
It’s in the name: FertiGlobal. Not just a fertiliser company with a difference, but one that’s making that difference worldwide, as our recent reports from South Africa illustrated.
Tasked with leading that charge is Claus Brakemeier, FertiGlobal’s Business Development Manager. He’s understandably excited about tackling Brazil, the largest agricultural market in South America…
From market takers to market makers. That’s the summary of our entry into Brazil, where we started off by acquiring a company – Agrigento, in 2019 – and are now, after hard work and investment in developing our existing offering to match the needs of Brazil’s farmers, on the cusp of something truly exciting.
While Agrigento and its crop nutrition brands had become well-known across Brazil, we knew we needed to enact a different strategy to align the business with our own, proven approach to crop nutrition and customer service.
Why? Because FertiGlobal’s products are different. As we’ve explained before, we come at product development from another perspective: that of prevention, rather than cure, subscribing to the view that a healthy crop is highly capable of defending itself against pest and disease threats as well as the threats imposed by abiotic stresses.
Our crop nutrition solutions are based on sound science – the science of plant biochemistry, physiology and nutrition – and holistic principles that look at the bigger picture. It’s not our way to focus on specific solutions that can only solve specific problems.
This is our Total Crop Management approach, a way of thinking that encompasses the whole lifecycle of plants, crops and crop stages. But it’s because it’s a different way of thinking that it requires a different approach in the market.
So that’s what we’ve finalised in Brazil this year. A new structure in which we can deploy a new strategy, uniting commercial sensibilities with our commitments to quality, crop protection, the environment and – most importantly of all – the farmer.
Brazilian farmers are well-informed and efficient in their practices. Agricultural research has played a vital role in the growth and success of the country’s agriculture – which is why we have not only emphasised FertiGlobal’s R&D driven philosophy within our Brazilian strategy but also put trials and demonstrations at its heart.
Leading the charge is our EnNuVi technology. This patented ‘bioactivator’ technology is at the heart of our mission to help make agriculture simultaneously more sustainable and more productive.
But a locomotive alone makes no sense. That’s why EnNuVi leads a whole rake of coaches – FOLIFLO, FOLIAREL and ACES among them – to create with Brazilian farmers a complete Crop Management Vision.
Brazilian farmers are technically competent. In many cases, we find them better informed than farmers in advanced farming areas such as California, or northern Europe. Their familiarity with agrochemicals is behind this competency, because the agchem multinationals have been active in South America for several years.
We’re using that competency to ‘slot in’ with our own bioactivating technologies. Because they’re science-based, like agchems, it’s easy for us to take the same approach and use farmers’ understanding of science to demonstrate how our technologies work, and why they make sense.
That’s the thinking behind our Brazilian demonstration farms. Aimed squarely at farmers and their advisers, these are being run by our ‘market developers – team members with specific technical responsibility, reporting to our speciality fertiliser manager. The same science-based approach also allows us to confidently explain to farmers the modes of action and product active ingredients. That’s in contrast to many other companies’ approaches to biostimulants. Often, they don’t know enough about the science of their products to share such information.
Our market developers know the agronomic efficiency of our products inside out. In demonstrating them side-by-side with conventional programmes, farmers see for themselves the value of the Total Crop Management approach. Crucially, our demonstration farms are real, working farms. Every decision made in those trials is based on agronomic intent and margin, rather than product promotion or commercial sway.
So, when the host farmer sees the (all too favourable) results, it’s his experience and opinion that he shares with his neighbours, supported by our speciality fertiliser manager. And in the same way that seed coatings are now standard practice for several crops, and no-one needs to convince a grower of their value, so too we can make EnNuVi the ‘go to’ product for crop stress relief.
What will help drive this is government policy, too. We’ve seen it in the Netherlands, where the government’s adoption of more sustainable measures in agriculture has created curiosity – and ultimately demand – for new, tech-driven solutions. That’s already happening in Brazil, which is why we think it’s one of our most exciting markets.
This is a market that’s open to innovation, and that’s why we’re adopting such a bold strategy – to be active in crop protection without recourse to ‘crop protection chemicals’. We can do all that we want to do by helping crop plants better deal with the stresses they’re subjected to – and that will continue to be our focus, whether in Brazil or anywhere else that FertiGlobal is active.
