Interview with Hugo Bony, Managing Director of Agrauxine.
How is the public-private partnership of the biocontrol consortium, in which Agrauxine participates, structured?
Created in 2016, the biocontrol consortium is the result of a partnership between public and private research players. I became vice-president to represent companies and private players on the board. This partnership enables us to initiate upstream thinking, to benefit from the work of researchers, where science is little present in companies.
Together, we define the ambitions and scope of the consortium's projects, and identify the cross-disciplinary subjects on which we want to make progress: evaluation protocols for biocontrol solutions, understanding plant health and physiology to better measure product efficacy...
What are the missions and ambitions of IBMA France, of which you are now Vice-Chairman and Secretary?
IBMA France is the French association of biocontrol product companies; it represents almost all biocontrol players, with the ambition of helping this industry to emerge.
Through various awareness-raising and communication initiatives, it aims to promote:
- biocontrol with public authorities and encourage the creation of a biocontrol industry
- the use of biocontrol products with users (farmers).
This is essential to raise awareness of the fact that biocontrol is already a reality. We need to invest heavily in research, but we also need to show that biocontrol exists, that it is a reliable solution today.
Why did you take part in the Bio4solutions Chair?
Training and information are fundamental to the development of biocontrol. According to an IBMA survey, we have noticed a real lack of information among farmers, who know the word "biocontrol" and are open to this new practice, but who come up against distributors who are reluctant to sell a new product.
Created in early 2020, the Bio4solutions Chair, aims to train a new generation of industry professionals (farmers, engineers, distributors, researchers), to lower the brakes, to get them to embrace biosolutions and accelerate the agro-ecological transition.
So, along with the other founding members of the Bio4Solutions Chair, we helped define and structure this training program, which will be launched at the end of October 2020 by ENSAIA, the University of Lorraine's agronomy and food industry engineering school.
What is Agrauxine's contribution to the agro-ecological transition?
Thanks to Lesaffre's commitment to Agrauxine, we are able to offer farming professionals technically mature biosolutions that will contribute to the emergence of a new model. This new model is the subject of internal reflection, but also of partnerships, as mentioned above, which will strengthen this vision. We can look forward to inspiring people to help create the agricultural model of tomorrow.
Our technical and industrial know-how enables us to offer technically mature solutions to replace chemical solutions, so that there are no longer any pesticide residues in certain crops.
More generally, through actions such as our participation in the Bio4solutions Chair, we are participating in this agro-ecological transition: we are encouraging all players - farmers, cooperatives and retailers - to get moving and build the model of tomorrow. To achieve this, farmers need to experiment with these new technologies and integrate them into their farming itineraries to limit the use of synthetic chemicals.