As confetti showers a theatre inside Rio de Janeiro’s normally sedate Museum of Tomorrow, electronic pop music pounds and dozens of young people crowd the stage to dance enthusiastically, hugging each other and waving flags as their audience films the festivities on their phones.

But this is not a religious event, or a disco. It’s an unusual conference that has attracted several hundred young people from across the world to pitch and discuss ideas on how to feed the world’s booming population with agriculture startups – and make their fortunes doing so.



“I didn’t know it was possible to create a business that can make an impact and make money,” Mariana Vasconcellos, who runs a successful “digital agriculture platform” called Agrosmart, tells the audience. She tested the business analysing irrigation flows and waste on her father’s farm. Her story is met with rousing cheers.

The main sponsor of the Thought For Food (TFF) conference is Syngenta, a global agribusiness and manufacturer of pesticides and herbicides – including paraquat, a weedkiller not authorised for use in the EU but manufactured in the UK and sold in Brazil.

Nobody mentions paraquat. Instead, buzzwords like “digital agriculture”, “vertical farming” and “multispectral thinking” ricochet around the museum’s white walls as attendees zap contact details to each other’s phones or duck into a virtual reality setup in a cardboard igloo to share dreams and memories.

[It's] very bleak for young people around the world so this is a moment they can get motivated and inspired Christine Gould

Delegates attend workshops, such as agroforestry training offered by reNature, a startup launched last year by Brazilian agronomist Felipe Villela and Dutch advertising executive Marco de Boer after they met at last year’s Thought for Food in Amsterdam.

Estela Camargo, 28, from São Paulo, attended the agroforestry workshop and learned about planting crops within existing eco-systems, rather than cutting them down.

“You have to return resources to the land. It’s not enough to be organic,” says Camargo, who was so inspired by the workshop she is now considering swapping customer services for sustainable farming.

Other startups compete for prize money and, after a “slam poet” performs over music by Pink Floyd, teams jog on to the stage as the audience whoops. Host Holley M Murchison – whose website describes her as a “dreamer and a purpose-driven doer” – asks the crowd: “Can you take some of this energy home with you?”

A Kenyan startup called Safi Organics wins $5,000 (£4,388) for a decentralised, organic fertiliser production system. Britain’s Aeropowder gets $5,000 for its scheme to make insulation out of poultry feathers. “This is a replacement for polystyrene,” says founder Ryan Robinson, 30. In the future, it will decompose “in something like compost”, he explains.

The grand prize of $10,000 is won by Coating+, a startup from four Nigerian biochemists, who developed a spray to preserve fresh produce made of chitosan, a fibrous substance extracted from shellfish and soy protein. Micronutrients are added separately.

The aim is to cut food waste to feed those in need, says Albert Kure, 26, one of its co-founders. “It’s a new market,” he says.

Delegates at the Thought for food festival in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Jelmer de Haas/Courtesy of Thought for Food

Thought for Food founder and CEO Christine Gould says the conference, held at the end of July, is for young people to share skills and ideas.

“There’s a lot of similar businesses that are trying to do the same thing in different parts of the world and TFF gives them the chance to share knowledge and learnings,” she says, after dancing centre stage in trainers equipped with flashing lights. The conference has a party atmosphere because things are “very bleak for young people around the world and so this is a moment they can get motivated and inspired”.

Before setting up Thought For Food in 2013, Gould worked at Syngenta for nearly 10 years. She says she is “agnostic” on the subject of pesticides.

“We are not advocating a particular point of view or solution. We are bringing together diverse points of view and stakeholders,” she says. “I personally have a very pro-science viewpoint but I empathise with people who don’t.”

Syngenta’s presence is low-key but marked. Ariadne Caballero, who runs its digital agriculture in Brazil, tells delegates to amass practical experience. “Get your boots dirty, guys,” she says.

Syngenta’s global strategy lead Steven Wall helps run a workshop in which delegates propose ideas to help smallholder farmers improve their businesses. One group sketches out an app to help them, not realising that many of Brazil’s rural areas lack mobile signals.

“We have a lot of different projects going on all over with the world with different smallholders, trying to create new businesses with them,” Wall explains.

Pesticide safety is part of his job, but Wall declines to discuss a controversial bill the Brazilian congress is discussing to lift restrictions on pesticides. The bill, dubbed the “poison package” by environmentalists, was approved by a Congress commission in June but has yet to be voted on.

“Countries tend to have different views on how much regulation is necessary,” he says. As for Brazil: “It’s a really big market.”

• This article was amended on 16 August 2018 to clarify the make up of the spray developed by Coating+



