S4
Improving Agricultural Yield with a Smarter Shared-Risk Approach

Today, even after adopting new technologies in their pursuit for better productivity and higher yields, farmers still have to cope up with the growing risks in the highly fluctuating and intensive agriculture industry. In addition to volatile agricultural and input prices, and the increasing difficulty in finding qualified farm workers, climate change risk management has become increasingly relevant for the farmers and the ag supply chain. S4—one of the fastest growing Ag-tech startups in Argentina—with its data analytics and decision-making tools enables companies to make data-driven decisions and build a smarter shared-risk approach for allocating their resources more accurately. “We are a technology company with high data analytics capabilities, and we provide a unique climate protection solution for the agriculture business. Our coverage solution allows for de-risking crop production, by transferring the risk associated with systemic weather events from the end-user to the financial market, very efficiently,” asserts Diego Steverlynck, the CEO of S4.

In a world where nobody provides efficient financial security for crops’ natural hazards like droughts or floods, and only a few insurance companies on the ball, S4 brings a change to the big picture with its Enhanced-Vegetation-Index-based product. With its proprietary technology, S4 decodes the growth of the plants and transforms biological assets into financial indices. S4 offers its data analytics to farmers, ag-related financial services providers, agricultural product suppliers, large food suppliers, and other agribusinesses.

For developing an understanding of the growth of a plant, its chronological stage, development stage, and to be able to assess the risk behind a specific crop in a particular place at that definite time, S4 runs remote sensing for satellite imagery, and then analyzes and interprets those images. A unique fact of S4’s model is that, once calibrated, the algorithms run based on satellite data and are independent from ground sources (i.e. farmers’ information), an approach that allows for simple and smooth global scalability.

S4 is coming up with a new way of looking into a product, not only through the incorporation of technology but also through the disruption from the delivery of the product to the market. Instead of delivering the protection packaged as an insurance product, the product is offered as a financial hedge (i.e. an offsetting position based on the S4Index) through the commodities trading houses. The product is very efficient, transparent, and simple. For instance, one of S4’s clients—Syngenta—that produces agrochemicals and seeds, covers the risk protection whenever a farmer buys any product. It is both a neat marketing proposal and a sound risk management solution. “The core of our business is creating the best indices that reflect what’s happening on the ground and to do that, it requires the use of technology, knowledge, and power for building huge databases, managing and processing petabytes of information. This involves enhanced neural programming capacities, AI capacities, and the use of other modern technological advancements,” explains Steverlynck.

With a focus on developing an understanding of how each of the different factors affects specific plants, S4 is building a vast database by developing an extensive knowledge of the interaction of the plants with their environment. This database when combined with other two databases, the genetic database—with genes stored together with software to enable users to retrieve, add, and extract information from the data—and the search database—the microbiomes, would lead to a whole new era of plant understanding and design. This goes a long way in helping companies to prepare a new breed of plants or genes ultimately.

In addition to its Buenos Aires headquarters, S4 has opened offices in St. Louis, MO, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. For the future, S4 aims to expand to the rest of Latin American countries, and to Ukraine, Russia, China, Australia, and South Africa.