Agri Business Review: Specials Magazine

Founded in 2010, Guadalsem has carved a specific market in the European agricultural sector with its dedication to providing the best seed genetics. The company’s commitment to sustainable crop cultivation and increasing farmer incomes has set it apart, especially in the wake of Europe’s food price crises and shortages. Guided by the visionary leadership of Olivier Crassous and sustained without external financial investments, Guadalsem stands as a testament to innovation and resilience in agricultural advancements. Its services can be broadly classified into two main categories—breeding, producing, and marketing premium seeds, along with offering seed production services to multinational corporations. Guadalsem’s journey began with cotton when it launched its flagship K product line, focusing on traits like adaptability, growth cycle, productivity, and fiber quality. In a significant move in 2014, the company partnered with key players in the global cotton market to develop a robust genetic improvement program. This initiative brought forth a portfolio of non-GMO cotton varieties tailored to the agroclimatic conditions of Spain, Greece, and Turkey, providing European farmers with access to world-class genetic advancements in cotton. The company’s foray into cereal breeding, targeting the underrepresented spring species, further exemplifies its commitment to innovation and diversification. This strategic expansion complements its cotton market expertise, ensuring Guadalsem remains at the forefront of agricultural development with a portfolio that responds adeptly to the food industry’s evolving needs. As a mark of quality, Guadalsem’s certification represents a pledge to its cutting-edge breeding practices and influence in shaping the future of global agriculture. The same level of proficiency also extends to its second business line—seed production services, which has solidified its status as a provider of choice for large-scale crops, such as sunflower, rapeseed, and cotton. Its quality and purity standards have garnered the trust of many major global corporations, leading to formidable partnerships. For instance, the company’s fruitful collaborations with prominent international seed corporations such as Bayer AG, Corteva Agriscience, BASF, Lidea, Limagrain, and RAGT have been a driving force behind the continual expansion of Guadalsem’s activities. “Our dedication to sustainability has been recognised with the prestigious ‘Premios Andalucía Excelente’ award in the Sustainability category for two consecutive years, 2021 and 2022,” says Crassous, general manager. These accolades affirm Guadalsem’s role as a catalyst in Europe’s sustainable agricultural endeavours. The European Cotton Renaissance with Guadalsem’s Non-GMO Revolution In an industry predominantly governed by genetically modified organisms, Guadalsem stands apart, securing a specific market in the cultivation of non-GMO cotton within the European market—specifically in Spain, Greece, and Turkey, with the latter being an especially key market. This strategic positioning is significant in a sector where GMOs account for the vast majority of global production. Confronting the decline of non-GMO cotton breeding programs in Europe, a challenge precipitated by the withdrawal of two major U.S. industry entities, Delta Pine and Phytogen, Guadalsem has played a crucial role in safeguarding the cotton industry from potential downturns in productivity and sustainability. With a focused and innovative approach, Guadalsem has benefited from his collaborations of advanced techniques, such as molecular markers and comprehensive data analytics, to enhance both the reliability and productivity of its cotton varieties. This proactive strategy became essential in maintaining and progressing the cotton sector in these targeted regions. Today, the success of the cotton breeding program is instrumental in ensuring the longevity and sustainability of cotton cultivation in Europe. While the market in countries like India, China, or the U.S. vastly overshadows that of Europe, the combined market potential of approximately 450,000 hectares in Turkey, 260,000 in Greece, and 52,000 in Spain is still quite substantial. This specific market presents Guadalsem with a distinct opportunity for growth and success. “We are one of the primary cotton seed producers in Europe, and our superior-quality seeds have yielded considerable success, with sales in Spain accounting for 46 percent of their turnover, while exports to Greece and Turkey comprise 54 percent,” says Crassous.

Farmers today enrich their soils by planting cover crops, reducing tillage and implementing diverse crop rotations. These practices also promise to generate income by storing carbon, which can be sold as credits. Recover Ag—an agricultural technology company—is making that promise practical with next-generation MMRV technology (Measuring, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification). Through initiatives such as the California Soil Restoration Project, farmers adopt practices that build carbon in their soils while Recover Ag manages the measurement behind the scenes. The company turns conservation into consistent profit by making soil carbon accounting accurate, scalable and affordable. So why has this been difficult until now? The barrier lies in how soil carbon accounting is currently managed. Most “carbon farming” projects use a “measure and model” accounting method. They measure using random selection of sampling locations, with limited coverage, often just one soil core every 20 to 40 acres. But random sampling does not account for the variation in soil carbon concentration throughout a field, which is related to factors like slope, cardinal direction, drainage and vegetation. Measurement of soil carbon through random, sparse sampling has very high levels of uncertainty. That uncertainty has prompted the registries that verify soil carbon projects to apply a large “uncertainty deduction” to the number of credits issued by a project. The deducted credits do not generate revenue for farmers or project operators. Current MMRV systems also rely on “process-based models” to generate predictions of soil carbon change without the high cost of soil sampling. Researchers have developed process-based models over the past few decades to simulate the behavior of a cropland ecosystem. They are very helpful for exploring research hypotheses, but they do not generate measurements that are accurate or precise enough for soil carbon credit accounting. Recover Ag is introducing several innovations to make the “measure and model” carbon accounting method accurate and precise enough to work for carbon credit issuance. Instead of random sampling, Recover Ag utilizes satellite imaging and other data to identify the zones in a field that are most likely to have variations in soil carbon levels. Recover Ag creates sampling plans that optimize coverage of the zone. The resulting samples are more representative and collected at a higher density, which increases the accuracy of the field-level measurements.