Thought Leaders at Volaris: Cultura’s Agri-food Experts

September 5, 2023

Dilys Chan

Specialists weigh in on global food supply chains and digitization in the agri-food space

Food security and the resilience of supply chains continue to be major themes in the agri-food sector, emerging as a key topic of discussion at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in early 2023, and at subsequent industry events.

Global conflict, supply chain disruptions, and the continued economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed food prices to all-time highs at the end of 2022. Those pressures have remained, while changing weather patterns mean that agricultural producers face uncertainty from heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts.

As the industry faces the need to adapt quickly to changing situations, the advantages of digitization are more apparent than ever. Leaders from Volaris agri-food portfolio, Cultura, have weighed in on how digitization can help.

Rich Reynertson, President of Cultura, was included in a feature on the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit website. The piece looks back at trends in digital ag-tech over the past ten years. Industry heavyweights weighed in on what they’ve learned over the past decade, and what new frontiers in technology to expect ahead.

In the article, he comments on how digitization can improve the entire food supply chain to create a thriving, resilient agri-food system.

“As a growing collective of global agri-food technology businesses, we have learned to lean into our customers’ needs to enhance and develop digitization strategies,” he shared. “Digitization involves more than providing the best technology. It’s about realizing insights and making better decisions in real-time, and we are helping our customers do so with all the data they collect.”

He further added: “Throughout the agri-food system, we share the challenge to enable traceability, safety, sustainability, and resilience…. Building confidence in the food supply over the next 10 years will be key — and this endeavor will unlock opportunities for everyone involved.”

Read the full article to learn more.

Duey Yliniemi, General Manager at Greenstone, was featured in Foodbytes, a publication by Rabobank. The goal of the publication is to foster connections within the food and agriculture industry, and to drive meaningful improvement in the food value chain.

An excerpt from his speech from the 2023 World Agri-Tech Summit was quoted: “There is a high level of collaboration needed with each partner you interact with. The current state of data drives higher costs. Systems that solve for this, by making it easier to collaborate and lower the cost of operations, still need to consider the high cost to maintain individual point-to-point solutions.”

Read the full report on the state of farm management information systems for more information.