The Unlimited Applications of Project Management in Agribusiness

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about Project Management in Agribusiness.

He explains how we can apply project management in this segment, which is so different for many of us.

Ricardo comments that agribusiness is transforming as powerful as the technology area, using digitalization, georeferencing e technology, and project to select crops that will be used in this area.

For example, the harvest of an agricultural product can be considered a project, as it is temporary and unique due to environmental, soil, and local conditions.

And project management will identify, for example, market, environmental, and price volatility risks that may occur depending on the type of harvest.

Agribusiness project management can also be used in logistics to distribute products and grains. Ricardo gives examples of global impact in this logistics, such as the distribution of grains in Ukraine contained in the Odesa port due to the war.

Another example is Brazil itself, a significant producer of agricultural products, with a continental dimension where the logistics of getting the products to the port is a great challenge.

Ricardo also talks about the agile approaches that are used by businesses that are born around agribusiness.

Finally, Ricardo comments on a project for grain flow using the river network, which is a doctoral thesis of a friend in Portugal and a project to support the sustainable planting of olive trees for olive oil in Morocco that was carried out during the period in which he led the project area at UNOPS (United Nations)

Listen to this week's #5minpodcast to learn more.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the 5 Minutes podcast. Today I'd like to talk about a different topic. I know that many times I talk about infrastructure, I talk about methods. But this week, I want to talk about project management and its applications in agribusiness. I want to talk about that because recently, I had the chance to teach and talk about project management market fit for an MBA in agribusiness in Brazil. Brazil is one of the agribusinesses is at heart and the center of our economy. And I am so surprised because most of the time when we think about agriculture and livestock, the first thing that comes to our mind is, you know, the concept of a farmer, something that I would say is not very technological, something that is attached to tradition to attach it to our own development. Like when we have the agricultural revolution. If you read Sapiens from Yuval Noah Harari, you remember what I'm talking about. This is something like 9000 years ago, but today it's a completely different environment. First, this kind of business today is absolutely heavy, as heavy as a bank, as heavy as a technology company in the application of digital and technology. It's incredible today. For example, what we can see today, we can see co-ops working together and creating apps to help people to buy and sell and exchange their products.

We can see organizations now planning their harvest using project management because every single harvest is a different project, because it's a different time frame, it's a different environment, it's a different logistic, it's different, you know, client, it's a different price, it's a different revenue. And they are using project management concepts to select crops to help to define which kind of crop is more lucrative and is less risky for them to cultivate. So this is on top of all the technology. I want to give you an example. In Brazil, you all know Brazil is a very big country and most of the time where farming and agricultural work happens is not very close. I would say to the export centers many times they need to travel thousands of kilometers or thousands of miles to get to the nearest port, to deliver the grains or to deliver the food that you just process for exportation. And for example, one of my friends here he just finished his Ph.D. in civil engineering, and his work is designing and implementing a movable port called Move Dock. It's a movable port. Imagine a ship that is a port but with no engine. Only instead of, for example, the production goes to the port, the port goes to the production, and this reduced the footprint dramatically because of CO2 emissions and all of this, because instead of having 1000 trucks driving 1000 miles or 1500 miles, you use this. You have a ship that will push the moving port together with all the grains, you know, in the large rivers in Brazil, bringing them to the export center at a much lower cost and in a much more sustainable way.

And why I'm using this, because this podcast is not about this specific project, but just to show you how opportunities are happening, opportunities to work on logistics, for food, on new ways of improving your crops, geo-referencing geofencing where machines will do all the harvest instead of people. So you have these huge machines that will do this kind of effort. And just to give you an example, at my time at the UN, we provided the award as the year's project to a project that was delivered and happened in Morocco. And this project was using project management to be even more specific to using PRINCE2 on sustainable farming. Just to give you an example, sustainable farming for olives. So families create a co-operative to help them to improve their farming skills and to improve their access to the market.

To sell olives and. Olive oil. This was an example and this you can find on the internet. This is the perfect use. I'm not saying not in the massive scale of the large producers, but the use of project management in this. And why I recorded this podcast is because we need all to open our minds because there is a massive and incredibly high opportunity for us to work and leverage our abilities as project managers. Even if you ask me, can people apply Scrum in the sector? And my answer is absolutely, absolutely. There is a concept that we are calling now agribusiness 4.0 that is all about integrating technology into the core business of agriculture. And most of these works use the concepts of Kanban, lean product development, and lean manufacturing, all of these concepts are applied here to agribusiness. And I think that for all of us, it's a new opportunity for us to apply what we know in something very exciting and very related to our own existence. That is food; that is the livestock. And this is incredible, and I'm very happy to have the opportunity to talk and share this knowledge with the students. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.

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