Will agriculture find its salvation in mathematics?

No. It’s to come back to it and to open up spaces for reflec­tion. The “food sys­tem” is at the heart of dif­fer­ent process­es: dis­tri­b­u­tion, con­sump­tion, and pro­duc­tion. Pro­duc­tion used to be a direct func­tion of three fac­tors: soil, ani­mals, and humans. All of these have been made more pro­duc­tive with mech­a­ni­sa­tion and nitrates (i.e. hydro­car­bons). In a way, we are eat­ing oil! The ques­tion today is: can we main­tain this pro­duc­tiv­i­ty with­out oil? And it is very dif­fi­cult to answer if we look at pro­duc­tion alone.

If we think in terms of the farm itself, one pos­si­ble answer is low tech; a return to prac­tices that exist­ed before mech­a­ni­sa­tion. But the ques­tion of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty soon comes up, and with it the ques­tion of cost.

Anoth­er response is to increase tech­no­log­i­cal inten­si­ty. But this still pos­es many prob­lems: it is not easy to extract beet­root with a robot. And ener­gy remains the key issue, even if we can imag­ine a shift to electricity.

On the oth­er hand, if we broad­en our think­ing from the farm to its wider con­text, and in par­tic­u­lar the food sys­tem, oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties appear. We can opti­mise organ­i­sa­tion, mak­ing sure that agri­cul­ture is bet­ter inte­grat­ed into food and finance chains. There is a lot of poten­tial here because we are talk­ing about a poor­ly organ­ised, frag­ment­ed and poor­ly mod­elled world, where many deci­sions are tak­en in a non-coop­er­a­tive way.

To opti­mise the way things are organ­ised, pub­lic poli­cies are need­ed. The issue of food secu­ri­ty has been an invis­i­ble prob­lem in the pub­lic are­na for sev­er­al decades, but just because the prob­lem has been solved does not mean that it will not arise again. Ques­tions of food sov­er­eign­ty will come up again soon, as cli­mate change will put a strain on pro­duc­tion systems.

How­ev­er, it is cer­tain­ly not a ques­tion of cen­tral­is­ing every­thing as we saw with Gos­plan, the dis­as­trous results of which are well known in agri­cul­ture. Rather, the chal­lenge is to bring about bet­ter coor­di­na­tion between play­ers whose inter­ests are not cur­rent­ly aligned.

Hence, one of the hori­zons is a plat­form for Euro­pean food, with a cer­tain amount of data shared between all the play­ers with­in the next thir­ty years. The plat­form will sup­ply the major dis­trib­u­tors and will also allow financiers to car­ry out risk analy­sis. Plat­formi­sa­tion allows the math­e­ma­ti­sa­tion of agri­cul­ture. It is the key to bet­ter organ­i­sa­tion. The chal­lenge is to make the dif­fer­ent chains (pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, financ­ing) more col­lab­o­ra­tive and to have new deci­sion-mak­ing tools. To do this, it is impor­tant to mod­el these chains from end to end, from the farm to dis­tri­b­u­tion and invest­ment funds, and to equip the deci­sion-mak­ing process­es at all geo­graph­i­cal lev­els. We need to put maths at the ser­vice of agriculture.

Yes, in the sense that the coop­er­a­tive mod­el in Europe com­pen­sat­ed for the fact that farms were too small by mak­ing it pos­si­ble, for exam­ple, to pool equip­ment: mod­erni­sa­tion and coop­er­a­tion went hand in hand and a new lev­el was reached. These coop­er­a­tives, some of which have become very pow­er­ful, were organ­ised as buy­ing and sell­ing groups, with some advice.

But the vir­tu­ous side of this mod­el was under­mined by two phe­nom­e­na: the first is that it belongs only to the farm­ers. The sec­ond is that Euro­pean agri­cul­ture has been organ­ised in silos, and that it has been organ­ised with­in the frame­work of an agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion pol­i­cy. Pub­lic poli­cies have thus cre­at­ed a clear sep­a­ra­tion between pro­duc­tion and food, which can still be seen today in the Green Deal.

It is time to rec­on­cile them, and math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els are capa­ble of doing so. Plat­formi­sa­tion and mod­el­ling offer a way of man­ag­ing col­lec­tive deci­sions and intro­duc­ing more ratio­nal­i­ty into them.

The agri-food sec­tor opti­mis­es its logis­tics and indus­tri­al process­es and fore­casts its food sales using mod­els. But noth­ing is coordinated.

Yes, but they too are marked by an incred­i­ble frag­men­ta­tion. Agri­cul­tur­al exper­tise is stored in thou­sands of small tools, spread­sheets, mini-sim­u­la­tors, small cal­cu­la­tors, devel­oped ad hoc by farm­ers, tech­ni­cal insti­tutes, asso­ci­a­tions, agri-food man­u­fac­tur­ers, coop­er­a­tives or lab­o­ra­to­ries, with­out any con­sol­i­da­tion. These tools are gen­er­al­ly “out­side the infor­ma­tion sys­tem”, i.e. they are not fed into any recur­rent data flow. They are also not very user-friend­ly, due to a lack of invest­ment, and are most­ly unused. Last but not least, what they lack is a sys­temic approach.

On the tech­ni­cal side, plant and ani­mal genet­ics are mod­elled, as well as fer­tilis­er and plant pro­tec­tion prod­uct pre­scrip­tions. On the finan­cial and agri­cul­tur­al account­ing side, risk scores, per­for­mance indi­ca­tors and busi­ness plans are mod­elled because of reg­u­la­to­ry mod­els. But agri­cul­ture has no sys­temic mod­el at the lev­el of indi­vid­ual farms. Deci­sion sup­port tools gen­er­al­ly mod­el only one facet of the liv­ing world: the con­trol of a par­tic­u­lar dis­ease, the imple­men­ta­tion of a par­tic­u­lar prac­tice, in short, a very small part of the over­all system.

The agri-food sec­tor opti­mis­es its logis­tics and indus­tri­al process­es and fore­casts its food sales using mod­els. But noth­ing is coordinated.

As for the mod­els used by pub­lic poli­cies, they are obso­lete and serve to dis­trib­ute sub­si­dies. They are mod­els of eco­nom­ic flows and bal­ances that look to the past and ignore the agro­nom­ic dimen­sion. We are thus deprived of the tools to steer the Green Deal, which explains why ide­ol­o­gy takes prece­dence over real­i­ty: the fig­ure of 30% less pes­ti­cides is thus a polit­i­cal fig­ure, which is not sup­port­ed by data. In terms of data and mod­el­ling, every­thing remains to be done.

It leaves us no choice. The prob­lems of poor coor­di­na­tion, frag­men­ta­tion and the sep­a­ra­tion of pro­duc­tion and food large­ly explain the con­di­tion of Euro­pean agri­cul­ture. It is a sec­tor that is poor­ly financed by the pri­vate sec­tor and sup­port­ed by pub­lic funds, which is won­der­ing about its future and find­ing it hard to invest.

Yet the real prob­lems are ahead of us: food secu­ri­ty, agro-ecol­o­gy, decar­bon­i­sa­tion, soil restora­tion. Every­thing needs to be done, in a con­text marked by cli­mate change, ten­sions over raw mate­ri­als and prob­a­ble tur­bu­lence on the world mar­kets for agri­cul­tur­al and food products.

Agri­cul­ture, which had been sim­pli­fied at the cost of car­bon and sub­si­dies, has sud­den­ly become what it was: a com­plex activ­i­ty, because liv­ing things are com­plex. And food is a very com­pli­cat­ed sub­ject. The sec­tor now has to deal with con­tra­dic­to­ry injunc­tions that place it on the thresh­old of a major disruption.

From the new geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion to the rise in the price of ener­gy and there­fore of inputs, all the ele­ments are present for a cri­sis, with domi­no effects. Even a minor ele­ment such as envi­ron­men­tal labelling con­tributes to desta­bil­is­ing the system.

This major dis­rup­tion opens up a field for cre­at­ing new mod­els, and the tech­nol­o­gy is there: with­out wait­ing for plat­formi­sa­tion, we are now capa­ble of cre­at­ing and run­ning mod­els that are sophis­ti­cat­ed and rich enough in data to allow math­e­ma­ti­sa­tion of pro­duc­tion, but also of con­sumer behav­iour and financ­ing – this last issue being cru­cial to accel­er­ate the transformation.

If we need to mod­el, it is because we are col­lec­tive­ly blind, and we look to the past when the chal­lenges are ahead. The actors are aware of what awaits them. The ques­tion for them is now to organ­ise them­selves to avoid tak­ing the wave head-on.

Interview by Richard Robert