Founder of Biotrop, a company in the biological pesticides sector that was sold to the Belgian group Biobest for almost R$3 billion, Antônio Carlos Zem is investing in a new business front, after leaving the day-to-day running of the company he founded in 2018.
The executive, who is currently part of the global board of BioFirst, a holding company created to manage the business, makes it clear that his new company will not be a competitor in the same field as Biotrop: “I am not in traditional biologicals”, he highlighted.
Biovirtus, the name of the new company, operates in the space that Zem calls “adjacent” in the biological sector: “with specialties”. The team for the brand is already being assembled, with sales underway and also creating a distribution system. “Bringing people with experience, but bringing new people to train. I’m betting a lot to start.”
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He was the guest on the eighth episode of the Raiz do Negócio podcast, your road between the countryside and Faria Lima, a partnership between InfoMoney e The AgriBiz
Sunscreen for plants
As new and perhaps unusual as it may seem, one of Biovirtus’ current focuses is the improvement of a sunscreen for plants, especially in an era of “climate imbalance”, as the executive mentioned in the podcast. “We have tropical and equatorial agriculture. Therefore, sun protection for plants is an important business,” he explained.
Currently, they have already launched their first product and, according to the businessman, it is already selling very well.
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Furthermore, at the same time, there are studies into new technologies for the so-called “transparent protector”, to prevent crops from suffering from “sun damage”, which causes the fruit to burn, depreciating the commodity: fruits, soybeans and corn, for example, suffer a lot from this problem, Zem pointed out. “The soybean leaves start to shrivel and dry out. We are already making the first sales for soybeans, specifically, and we will see the results”, he summarized.
New fronts
In addition to agricultural sunscreen, the entrepreneur also invests in heat and light in the agribusiness environment, focusing on the complex photosynthetic issue – and on the thermal comfort of the plant, using lights of the most favorable spectrum.
“If we have products that can act in this sense, increasing photosynthetic capacity and increasing thermal comfort, we will have much more productive plants. And the first results are attractive, very interesting”, he stated, during the interview. The expectation, at the moment, is that there is a chance of around 70% of success in this segment.
It is also worth mentioning that algae are organisms that are on the business radar.
