ALMAG: The Deficiency Soybeans Couldn’t Show  

Plants are talking, and ALMAG is listening – using AgroCares technology to detect nutrient deficiencies before visible symptoms appear and helping lift soybean yields by up to 12%.  

At AgroActiva, one of Argentina’s largest agricultural exhibitions, the ALMAG team placed wheat and soybean samples beneath a portable scanner and analyzed them in front of the farmers gathered at its stand. 

A farmer would walk up, doubtful. Someone from the team would press a leaf or a stem against a handheld scanner. And somewhere between the scan and the number appearing on-screen; minutes, not days, the skepticism would begin to fade. 

“The reaction was often: ‘Wow,'” Dr. Federico Zuljan, CTO and co-founder of ALMag, says. 

It’s a small word for a genuinely strange experience: watching a plant tell you what is happening inside it. For ALMAG, a division of the ALM Group working out of Rosario, one of the world’s busiest ports for grain and fertilizer exports; that reaction was the whole point. It captured both the promise of the technology, and the work still required to introduce it to Argentine agriculture. Farmers here trust science, but they distrust anything that has not proven itself on their own soil first.  

Who ALMag are

ALMag was co-founded two years ago by Ezequiel Marchionni (PhD in Agricultural Sciences) and Federico Zuljan (chemist and PhD in Biological Sciences). Their business is crop nutrition: reading soil and plant tissue to tell large-scale growers exactly what their fields need, and when. Their clients farm at a scale that is hard to picture from outside Argentina; one manages 40,000 hectares of soybeans, corn and wheat. Their territory stretches from southern Santa Fe and Córdoba to Entre Ríos and northern Buenos Aires, with new work starting in La Pampa, Río Negro and Salta.

Those distances matter, because by the time a result returns, the crop may have already changed. “The distance between them can be comparable to travelling from Lisbon to Berlin,” Federico says of two of ALMAG’s client regions. A traditional lab result can take four to ten days to come back, long enough for a young maize plant to grow three or four new leaves. The information may still be scientifically valid. Its value as a decision, however, is fading. 

Bringing the analysis to the decision 

AgroCares’ scanner records the spectral fingerprint of a leaf, soil, or feed sample using near-infrared technology. The corresponding software license, such as LeafCares or SoilCares, connects that scan to calibrated prediction models, turning spectral data into nutrient information that an agronomist can interpret and use. 

 “The results are available almost in real time,” Federico says. “That is a game changer in Argentina, because the distances between farms and laboratories are often very large. Being able to take the scanner directly into the field is therefore extremely valuable.” Put more plainly, in his words:

“With this technology, the laboratory effectively comes to the farm.” 

That distinction is important in Argentina. Globally, 30 percent of farmers run regular soil analysis, while in Argentina Federico estimates the number closer to 5 or 6 percent. Not because farmers do not understand the value of the data. “The problem is not a lack of knowledge or intelligence,” he says. “The barriers are often practical, economic, and logistical.” 

Then there is the soil itself, Argentina’s historically fertile soils have shaped the way many producers think about nutrition too. Rich in organic matter, phosphorus, and potassium, they supported decades of production without making nutrient testing feel urgent. Decades of heavy cultivation have started to change that, and soil degradation is becoming harder to ignore. Add Argentina’s steep export taxes on top, and the math gets even harder: when commodity prices dip and the tax burden does not, growers think twice before spending on anything unproven. 

“Our role is to validate the technology and provide what I would call a soft landing for farmers,” Federico said. “Farmers need a local company that can connect the potential of the technology to their specific problems.” 

That is the gap ALMAG built itself to close, and why, a little over a year ago, they started working with AgroCares. The Netherlands-based company originates out of one of the oldest agricultural labs in Europe and started in 2013 with the introduction of near-infrared technology for soil analyses. What began with soil analysis grew into a broader system of portable scanners analyzing multiple products (soil, leaf feed, produce, fertilizer) with calibrated prediction models. Today, more than 2000 AgroCares scanners have supported over 2.3 million analyses across more than 140 countries. The technology is used throughout the agricultural value chain—from farmers and local agronomists to multinational food companies. The idea hasn’t changed: read the spectral fingerprint of a soil, leaf, or feed sample right where it’s standing, get an instant result, make a decision and skip the trip to the lab. Over the past year, ALMAG ran 500 to 600 tissue analyses across Argentina to validate the technology locally. Its validation work covered around 10,000 hectares across southwestern Córdoba, Entre Ríos, southern Santa Fe and northern Buenos Aires. Then came the decisions! 

The problem the farmer could not see

One clear example of what a real-time read can catch is calcium. 

In 90 percent of the soybean tissue samples ALMAG tested; calcium levels were low. Not because the soil lacked calcium outright, but because of how little of it was actually available to the plant, a function of the soil’s base saturation that a simple nutrient count would miss entirely. A rainy summer made it worse, unsettling the balance between calcium and boron right when the crop needed it most. Here is what makes the deficiency dangerous: soybeans do not show it. 

“The most important point is that the farmer would otherwise have been blind to the problem,” Federico said.  

“Calcium deficiency may not become visibly apparent until flowering, when the soybean plant begins losing flowers. Once that happens, it may already be too late to intervene effectively.” 

By the time a farmer can see the problem, in other words, the plant has already started dropping the flowers that would have become beans. ALMAG’s scans caught it earlier. One or two foliar calcium applications, tested across working farms, produced yield increases of up to 12 percent. Per hectare, that means 400 to 600 additional kilograms of soybeans, against a treatment cost of around $12. The return: somewhere between 7 and 8 times what was spent. This is where the speed of analysis becomes more than convenience. It changes when an agronomist can intervene.

This wasn’t the only relationship the scanner exposed. 

In one maize case, ALMAG performed tissue analysis at the V5 growth stage. The farmer expected to apply a certain amount of urea as part of re-fertilization. But ALMAG’s analysis with the AgroCares software pointed in another direction: the crop required less nitrogen than anticipated, but it showed a zinc deficiency. Correct the zinc, cut the nitrogen, and yield rose 7 to 8 percent: a rare case of spending less and harvesting more. This way, the farmer spent less on an input that was not required at the expected rate and directed attention to the nutrient the plant was actually missing.  

The scanner also helped ALMAG examine relationships that can disappear when nutrients are considered individually. In one experiment, a nitrogen-to-sulphur ratio of approximately 9:1 performed better than a ratio of around 4:1. This is a relationship no vegetation index can see, because it isn’t measuring one nutrient; it’s measuring the relationship between two. The same logic held for phosphorus and zinc in young wheat and maize: high phosphorus was quietly starving the plants of zinc, invisibly, until a scan caught it in time to fix.

An NDVI image may indicate that a crop is under stress, but it cannot explain why. Tissue analysis can move the conversation from what the plant looks like to what is happening inside it. “This went beyond a basic minimum viable product,” Federico says of the validation work.

“It gave us the confidence to move into the next phase of distribution and expansion.” 

From validation to access 

ALMAG spent a year testing a technology before trusting it with a single client field. AgroCares built the tool that lets them do it in hours instead of weeks. Somewhere between those two decisions, a farmer in Córdoba or Entre Ríos got to keep the flowers on a soybean plant that would otherwise have dropped them, unnoticed, come flowering season. 

This approach reflects the wider purpose behind AgroCares’ work; the company’s stated mission is to make nutrient testing accessible while helping preserve fertile soils for future generations. 

ALMAG’s work is still expanding. Their next phase includes soil calibration work in southern Santa Fe and northern Buenos Aires, two strategically important agricultural areas, as well as the beginning of scanner distribution throughout the country. 

For agricultural organizations trying to bring nutrient diagnostics closer to the field, the ALMAG experience offers a place to begin.

Learn more about AgroCares’ scanner solutions and how local partners are putting nutrient information into practice.