xFarm, an Italian SME headquartered in Piedmont, grew impressively to 270 employees in seven years from its creation in 2018, providing now services to almost half a million farm businesses across Europe, and in South America.
“We thought we would need to address farming issues from the perspective of farmers – says Giovanni Causapruno, director of sales in Europe – to simplify operations and maximise efficiency. We wanted to deliver a one-stop shop that farmers would find easy to use and well-calibrated on their needs. We looked at the entire spectrum of needs in farm management, rather than falling into the trap of hyperspecialized niche applications. And we put a lot of effort in usability. 95% of our clients use the app from their mobile. We invested a lot to make it simple”.
Right now xFarm offers DSS (Decision Support Systems) on water consumption, management of fertilisation, usage of chemicals, in particular for protection against fungi diseases, and pests alerts based on proprietary sensing technologies. The DSS can also be integrated with machinery, thus leveraging on data that may be acquired by machines. With an increasing number of requirements for farmers to report on treatments and other operations, a lean approach to treatments’ records becomes fundamental.
“Our strength – continues Giovanni – has been the ability to address supply chains efficiently. With increasing claims on the adoption of regenerative agriculture approaches, the traceability along the entire supply chain is a must. The solutions we developed allow our clients to address several phases and actors of the supply chain, from harvesting to transformation and more. We have been able to meet the expectations of large groups like Barilla, Lavazza, Ferrero, to name a few. Behind this success – he adds – there is also the precious expertise we acquired working in Brazil, where we could test our solutions on a scale that cannot be found in Europe”.
The EU presents a patchwork of countries and regulatory systems. “Even with the CAP, we experience the bottlenecks of fragmentation. But we are witnessing growing demand for scalable services in Central and Eastern Europe, for instance in Poland and Hungary, where projects on regenerative agriculture applied to maize, colza and soy are gaining terrain”.
Giovanni sees Artificial Intelligence as a key factor in the future. “We are already working to make farm management simple and compliant with regulations – he says – on treatments’ records, for instance. But we’ll also work on Gen AI, lots of stuff coming up in the near future, alongside fundamental investments in education and training. We are launching a module integrated with WhatsApp to interact naturally with the application, allowing to send audio messages and texts to record information easily. This is increasingly important given the imminent arrival of the digital field notebook.
Furthermore, we have launched two initiatives, xFarm Academy for experienced agronomists, and xFarm Education, open to schools. Technology might actually prove to be the right instrument to attract young generations to farming”.