Husqvarna Group to Acquire InCeres

Aug 27, 2024

Husqvarna Group has signed an agreement to acquire the Brazilian company InCeres, a digital platform in the Professional light agriculture segment, according to a press release from Aug. 23, 2024. InCeres is an expert in soil analysis that facilitates decision-making and improves productivity for farmers. Its precise agriculture digital platform will act as the cornerstone for establishing Husqvarna Group's Total Farm Management offering in the Light Agriculture business unit within the Husqvarna Forest & Garden Division.

With climate change, farmland reduction, healthier food demand and an increasing population, Husqvarna Group anticipates that more food needs to be produced from less land, requiring new technologies and ways of working. By digitizing all activities and measurements on the farm and then generating AI-assisted agronomic advice, farmers can reduce this uncertainty and be empowered to make the right decisions for their specific issues.

"Our envisioned Total Farm Management solution can combine digital intelligence on the one hand and our mechanical solutions on the other hand. Such an offering will be truly disruptive, and Husqvarna Group aspires to be the first company to develop such a complete offering for light agriculture applications", says Mauro Favero, Light Agriculture President, Husqvarna Forest & Garden Division. "This offering will create go-to-market synergies with Husqvarna Group's current agriculture solutions, driving a higher conversion of light agriculture farmers into a unique and trusted Husqvarna one-stop-shop ecosystem that creates value, convenience, and efficiencies across the whole crop cycle."

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Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.