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