Biostimulant Product Manager, Agrauxine by Lesaffre
Fabien ACHARD, Biostimulant Product Manager at Agrauxine by Lesaffre, is in charge of the Biostimulant portfolio globally. He works on each product strategy to market it in different countries: investigating the market and the distribution network, defining the strategy, creating the marketing tool box, following clients to offer explanations about the product and information for sales and so on.
Marketing the products. Explaining how to use biostimulants, why biostimulants are important and interesting tools to use for distributors, retailers and farmers.
I will talk about one of our main products - Smartfoil - that we are today selling in more than 20 countries in the world (4 countries in Africa). The idea is to share our experience about how to sell biostimulants, explain how to use them and their mode of action in order to give all the important tools to understand the way to apply the product, when and on which target.
I think that Africa is a continent full of opportunities in agriculture in the coming years. New technologies can be very useful for growers in these countries because it helps them to increase productivity in lands where today yield can be much better.
In order to achieve these challenges, agronomic practices have to be challenged with an agroecologist focus to develop, and Africa is the right continent to perform it. In the case of biostimulants, numerous crops are facing abiotic stress and biostimulants can be a perfect tool to secure the yield and therefore enhance productivity.
I am reading many articles currently on agroecology and the way to think about all the cropping management and link between soil, crop and climatic factors.
During the four years I worked in South America for the development of Agrauxine’s biostimulant technologies. I understood that it took time to explain the way to use these products. However, when farmers started to test the product once, they always came back to use it each year and it became an additional tool in their agronomic system.
The challenge with these products is first to understand the way it works and train people about the way to use it. Also it is critical to well define what is the target according to the need of the farmer in order to then sell it.