FoA 254: The Digitization of Global Agribusiness with Syngenta Chief Information Officer Greg Meyers

<p><strong>Please participate in our</strong> <a href= "https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU"><strong>listener survey</strong></a> <strong>to help us focus the direction of the show: <a href= "https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU">https://airtable.com/shrCB33GWIUCIxVRU</a></strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Today we get a unique global view into agtech and agribusiness. We are joined by Greg Meyers, who is the Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer of</span> <a href="https://www.syngenta.com/en"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Syngenta</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">based at their world headquarters in Switzerland. Most of you are familiar with Syngenta but you may or may not know they are the largest crop protection company in the world and the third largest seed company in the world. They also provide digital ag platforms to 125 million acres of global crop production. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greg offers his perspective as someone with a front row seat to the global digitization of agriculture. We talk about the agtech customer in various countries, Syngenta’s acquisition strategy, their role in both digital ag and soil health, and some interesting ideas worth pondering about the future of agriculture. </span></p> <p><strong><em>“The reality of it is that a lot of the growers really have a very specific set of things they're trying to accomplish. And obviously the nature of the work is there's a really compressed window in which those activities have to happen. So if you're trying to create these solutions and they don't fit within that window of work, they really have a hard time finding a fit.” - Greg Meyers</em></strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greg comments that he sees a lot of agtech startups with a really innovative piece of technology that doesn’t answer a direct problem the farmer needs solved. “It’s almost like a solution looking for a problem...So what we’re trying to do is to take our innovation experience in chemistry