Jonathan Ramsay is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, but has been living and working in Brussels for over 20 years. He has been working in the agricultural field for the past 13 years.

Jonathan has held various positions within Monsanto in both Government and Public Affairs and now leads Public and Industry Affairs for the EMEA region. In this position Jonathan leads Monsanto’s external communications with a wide range of stakeholders and has a particular focus on Monsanto’s contribution to sustainable agriculture.

Karsten is Global Head Cereals for Syngenta International AG.  He leads a cross-functional team responsible for Syngenta’s global business operations in Cereals across Crop Protection, Seed Care, and Seeds technologies.  Before this, he was heading up Syngenta’s corporate strategy, planning, business intelligence and new business development activities.

José Augusto Cardoso has an extensive and successful background in many Agribusiness areas such as procurement, supply management, planning, manufacturing, logistic, product management, trading & merchant sales. He specialises in strategic projects concerning food & Drink, animal nutrition, consumer goods, bio business and agriculture. José is always envisioning a fruitful integration into the business of any new or existing sector with the aim to maximise income and profits.

José combines strong leadership and management skills with a talent for innovative company restructuring and has experience working in: Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina and Central America, North America, China, Australia and Europe.

He has achieved impressive and hard-to-ignore results (e.g. increase of net profit in 600%), across a number of different projects and initiatives in order to realise a new and visionary Supply Chain Management process.

José is an accomplished speaker and holds the important role of consultant in government matters.

Michael Horsch was born in 1959 and is founder of the HORSCH Maschinen GmbH. After his job training he spent some time in the USA. Back in Germany he began to develop new technologies for agricultural machinery. As a result of this the first direct seed drill came to life: the Horsch Sä-Exaktor (Seed Exactor).

In 1984, Michael Horsch, his father Dankwart and Walter Horsch founded the HORSCH Maschinen GmbH as chief partners. Michael and Walter Horsch became directors. The Terra-Trac became an important mainstay of sales. With this three-wheel tractor, first designed as a self-propelled seeding machine, Horsch became more known.

When the German reunification took place, the situation changed at one go: Suddenly there were big farms in great numbers that wanted new technology. So Horsch developed more products particularly for bigger farms starting with 1.000 hectare.

The Horsch company also profits from experiences and tests that are carried out on a farm that Michael Horsch, his brother Philipp and several partners run in the Czech Republic.

Horsch is one of the biggest manufacturers of seed drills and soil cultivation. Beside the Horsch subsidiaries in France, Russia and the Ukraine, Horsch has partner companies all over the world.

Olivier Dubois is the Senior Rural Institutions Officer and Coordinator of the Bioenergy Group within the Climate, Energy and tenure Division of FAO. An Agronomist, Land Use and Natural Resource Management Specialist, he has a Masters in Agronomy, Certificates in Tropical Agriculture, Rural Economics and Sociology from the Faculty of Agronomy of Gembloux, Belgium, and a Masters in Environmental Management from the European Community Environment Programme. 

Rodrigo is a Professor at The Federal University at Tocantins State. He holds a Magister Scientiæ Degree in Agrienergy. His areas of expertise are Agrienergy (biomass fuels), Agribusiness, and Agri Investment projects in Latin America (LATAM).
Prof. Rodrigo started his professional career in 1994 as a bank manager at Banco de Crédito Nacional - BCN, being responsible for the development of heavy vehicles leasing operations (airplanes, truck and bus fleets and construction machinery). After this experience in the Brazilian financial market, Rodrigo joined Monsanto’s commercial team in Brazil acting as Key Account Manager. In 2002 he accepted the opportunity to become Regional Sales and Marketing Manager for Nortox S/A. First being responsible for managing the operations in the south of the country, than accepting the challenge to run Nortox’s operations in the Brazilian new agriculture frontier, best known as MATOPIBA. It gave Rodrigo a full vision of Brazil’s agribusiness peculiarities. In 2006 Rodrigo started his own agribusiness consulting office and performed business plans and feasibilities projects for North American and European investment funds as well as projects for European private investors. In 2008 Rodrigo went back to the corporate world and joined AGCO. He was given the chance to work on the commercialization of tractors and combines. In 2010, already holding his Masters degree and starting his Doctoral studies, Rodrigo concentrated full time attention to his academics researches and is now a full time Professor and Researcher at The Federal University at Tocantins State.
At present Prof. Rodrigo is dedicating himself in an important academic research entitled “Decision making in agricultural derivatives with time series forecast models”.

Tom Green (44) lives in the UK from where he has pursued a career in European agribusiness. Formerly General Manager at G’s Marketing Ltd and Chief Executive of Greens of Soham Ltd in the UK, Tom was appointed CEO of Spearhead International Ltd in 2002. Spearhead has 70,000 hectares of farm operations as well as property, trading and supply management activities in the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.

Christian Pallière graduated from France’s Institut National Agronomique (INA) as an agronomist engineer, with business diplomas from INSEAD and CRC.

He began his career in the crop protection industry, focusing on sales and marketing in the French subsidiary of Ciba Geigy (now Syngenta), where he acquired good practical knowledge of the farming sector, particularly in the area of arable crops, but also in amenity markets and industrial pesticides.

In 1992, he joined the French sales team of leading fertilizer producer Hydro Agri (now Yara), moving on to the central marketing department in 1996, where he was responsible for various global research and development programmes to set up and promote best nutrition practices for several high value crops.

He joined the Brussels-based European Fertilizer Manufacturers Association (EFMA) in 2001, where he is now Director for Agriculture and Environment.

Ton was born in 1956 and holds a BASc degree in electronic automation ( Technical University Hilversum) and is Managing Director of Kverneland Group Mechatronics BV.

In 1984, Ton introduced the Mechatronics concept for the agriculture business in the company and was founder of Kverneland Group Mechatronics BV and has won several innovation awards over past 26 years.

Innovation is the core business of Kverneland Group Mechatronics, competence centre for electronic controls for agriculture implements, within the worldwide Kverneland Group and is based in Nieuw Vennep, the Netherlands.

With a professional team of 52 people, (of which 24 R&D engineers), Kverneland Group Mechatronics is global leader in the optimisation of agriculture (implement) processes using software, hardware and mechatronic solutions.

A special taskforce group for Precision Agriculture is constantly working on sustainable solutions for the agriculture business.

The Kverneland Group Mechatronics is one of the founding member of worldwide AEF (Agriculture Electronic industry Foundation).

The AEF is an independent international industry platform to support and promote implementation of agricultural electronics standards that have been developed and adopted by the international community.

Hubertus M. Mühlhäuser was appointed Senior Vice President & General Manager of Eastern Europe and Asia (EEA) in January 2009. Mr. Mühlhäuser joined AGCO as Senior Vice President for Strategy & Integration in September 2005. In 2006 he assumed additional responsibilities for Global IT and in 2007 he became General Manager for AGCO's global engine business, AGCO SISU POWER. Mr. Mühlhäuser will continue to have overall responsibility for these areas in addition to his new role.

Prior to AGCO, Mr. Mühlhäuser spent more than 10 years at Arthur D. Little. He succeeded in being the youngest partner in the history of Arthur D. Little, when being made Partner in 1999. From 1999 - 2005, he led Arthur D. Little's Global Strategy & Organization Practice, the company's largest line of business. From 2001 to 2005, he was Managing Director of the Swiss Operations of Arthur D. Little and he was a key negotiator of Arthur D. Little's successful management buy-out in 2002.

I have more than 25 years experience in the GIS and Survey industry. I started my career in the Coal Mining Industry in South Africa, after which I moved into the GIS and Survey industry, and then entrenched myself in the niche Precision Agricultural sector for the last 8 years of my career.

Relatively new to CNH’s International Region team, I’m Responsible for Market development of Precision Farming applications in (Emerging Markets) Including CIS, Middle East, Africa, Asia, China and Australia (not emerging). Developing these channels and transforming a product offering from “on the shelf” to a successful implementation that adds value to the client’s day-to-day operations.

Mr Andrey Sizov Jr. is a Managing Director at SovEcon. He has more than ten years of experience as an advisor or consultant to organizations such as Cargill, Syngenta, USDA, US Grains Council, the World Bank and the Russian Government.

Mr. Sizov is a member of the Expert Council with the Russian Ministry of Agriculture.

Mr. Sizov holds a degree in Finance and Credit from the Financial Academy of the Government of the Russian Federation in Moscow.

Simon was appointed Head of Agriculture for Trigon Agri in 2010  where he is responsible for the Agronomic direction of the business that is farming in excess of 90,000 ha’s in Russia and East Ukraine. 

Having left the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester in 1979, Simon worked for private owners in Denmark and  the UK, before joining Velcourt in 1990 as a farm manager.

In 1992, in addition to farm management, he assumed responsibility for a consultancy contract with a co-operative in Northern France cropping in excess of 21,000 hectares.

Simon’s overseas experience was further strengthened in 1998 when he serviced a four year contract providing logistical and agronomic advice to a 12,000 hectare CDC Arable and Coffee Project in the Mpongwe area of Zambia.

In 2001, he was appointed Farms Director for Velcourt , and he subsequently successfully oversaw  large arable farms in Southern Hungary and West Ukraine, until joining Trigon Agri in 2010