Introduction
FarmCado is one of the biggest importers and distributors of avocado in the U.S., working with Mexican farmers since 1970. Mexico is the largest avocado producer on the planet, with 2,02 MM metric tons (only in 2017) throughout more than 500,000 acres.
Since the company’s core values are well aligned with environmentally friendly practices and sustainability, FarmCado’s CEO chose to deploy the company’s resources to assess the entire avocado production chain to help producers become more sustainable.
Firstly, it was imperative to detect which farmers were not adopting sustainable practices and, for those who were, develop a new label to prove their actual value.
After leveraging SmartCloudFarming’s advanced agricultural satellite technology, in 17 days, they accurately analyzed more than 80,000 acres in Mexico and discovered that 37% of their suppliers were not following sustainable practices. Many of them were incurring illegal ones using not efficiently natural resources damaging the environment.
A single avocado requires 227 litres of water to grow, that’s why plantation owners have installed illegal pipes that divert water from natural rivers to increase their yield, but this has caused massive draughts. At the same time, other farmers have been severely deforesting areas to plant even more avocados.
This led FarmCado’s CEO to take explicit actions and cut off those farmers who were not following regenerative agriculture practices and a holistic approach.
The Challenge
Since the millennial culture adopted avocado as a core product of daily consumption, its demand has been significantly on the rise, especially in the western hemisphere, forcing farmers to adopt any tool to fulfil this demand by whatever means necessary.
Due to the topographical configuration of Central & South America, the region has become the largest producer of avocados. Being an industry worth 5.6 billion dollars every year, producers’ rapid adaptation came at the expense of sustainability and the environment itself.
As a green company, the challenge for FarmCado was to detect which supplier was following sustainable practices and which ones weren’t. They had more than 300 producers covering more than 80,000 acres in Mexico. Manually testing such a volume of land was a budget-breaking and time-consuming task. Almost impossible. But the company could not be co-responsible for un-environmentally practices.
The Solution
SmartCloud Farming implemented their agricultural satellite imagery technology, topped with their advanced A.I. and neural deep network system, to analyze the vast extension of producers’ lands. The goal was to get an accurate real-life 3D mapping of it and allow FarmCado to measure soil carbon in the area correctly.
The Results
After 17 working days of conducting the analyses, SmartCloud Farming accurately analyzed the entire carbon stock status via the agricultural satellite images of more than 80,000 acres of land. And not only that, but their advanced technology also built a reliable mapping with a 30 centimetres depth of the topsoil throughout the past five years.
FarmCado detected those farmers that were resorting to illegal practices and stopped working with them. Furthermore, they developed the net-zero emission avocado label, portraying the sustainable effort of the remaining compliant suppliers.
All while cutting costs significantly and saving enormous amounts of time.
“We wouldn’t have been able to afford the cost of manually sampling those 80,000 acres. And if we did, we would have never gotten the precision that SmartCloudFarming achieved. A game-changer allowed FarmCado to get closer to a net-zero company.” – [C.R.] FarmCado CEO.
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