History - Autonomous Agro Machines

Our History

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Our forestry project and, more recently, reforestation to recover degraded areas, arises from a childhood dream in the 1970s, when Marcello Guimarães, founder and current president of the board of directors of the iPlantForest Group, studied at an agricultural boarding school, studying and working in the field daily for a couple of years, in those first years of his childhood, his love for the land, the countryside, agricultural production, respect for the environment and the people who live off the land emerged. At the age of 18, he began his career in the technology area, where he worked as a programmer, project analyst, systems analyst, founded his first company, and launched in 1993 the best-selling software in the history of microinformatics in Brazil to this day. , the Visual Kit 5, system generator for lay users, best seller throughout Brazil, and which for years was the best-selling product on the Shoptime.com channel, among other TV shopping malls, and resellers across the country, in Europe and in the United States, where he expanded his business in 1997, lived and worked for 5 years.

‘Visual Kit 5’ Book Version 8 (4th Edition/2004

In 2012, he discovered Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, where he moved, got married and formed a new family, choosing the state as the base for yet another successful new venture. After much study and testing, she founded the company Mahogany Roraima, a company specialized in planting African mahogany, which is currently the largest African mahogany planting enterprise in Brazil.

The mahogany project begins. Same planting in January/17 and in July/17.

Right at the beginning of this project, thanks to the studies of his brother and partner Eduardo Guimarães, he understood the need to plant forests (multiple species forming a set of native and exotic trees) and began the first research and studies to find a solution to the gigantic task. to plant forests on an industrial scale, as he had been doing with African mahogany. It turns out that planting a single species, for example, African mahogany, is much easier than planting and achieving success in a forest with multiple species. During the following years of research, he created and built the first industrial-scale forest planting machine, with quality and speed superior to the method he had created to plant trees, a method used by Mahogany Roraima. The method developed by him and his team was already extremely fast and difficult to overcome, the new forest planting machine, developed over almost 6 years, did the job, and currently plants with fewer people, and much faster than the method they had created.

Studies for machine construction.

Recently his brother and partner Eduardo Guimarães, who was one of the creators of the Visual Kit 5, Kit 5 Mobile, BCyou and other successful projects, joined the project, which created the iPlantForest Consortium, at his request, and has contributed significantly for the development of all intelligence, both in the forest planting machine and in management systems, monitoring and detection systems that use artificial intelligence and the entire automation part of the company. Eduardo Guimarães and his son Nicholas Guimarães developed all the artificial intelligence and automation that the company uses today and which made our machine a machine with Industry 4.0 characteristics. Right at the beginning of the creation of the planting method developed by Mahogany Roraima, we invited and incorporated into our team, an old partner of many years, our partner and advisor Rodrigo Pereira, who for years worked alongside us in the technology company, where he started his career and to this day has accompanied us in all our endeavors for more than 24 years. Then important partners were incorporated into the projects, people who have been with us for many years and who have always believed in our creative strength, our determination to face the difficulties along the way and, above all, who understand the importance of reforestation to save the world from the problems that lie ahead. living and that will worsen every day with climate change.

Concerned about taking reforestation to scale, they developed a SAAS (Software as a Service) system that manages all the company’s activities, dividing each task by IOP (Standard Operating Instruction), mapping each activity and standardizing everything, controlling all services, from smaller to more complex with OS (service order), georeferencing everything, so that any employee, investor, or partner can follow and know exactly where and how each company activity is being carried out, in real time. This way we make the management of the entire forest cycle transparent, we organize it like a “McDonalds”, and we guarantee that everyone can follow and know exactly how the resources are being used and where. This way, we can undertake large reforestation projects anywhere in the world, providing accurate information to all project members.

Our concern from the beginning was to ensure scalability of reforestation projects or recovery of degraded areas, and transparency for everyone involved.

This is iPlantForest, a transparent and scalable initiative for planting and managing large forests anywhere on the planet.

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