Mercedes Iborra receives the Food Changemaker 2026 award for her contribution to data-driven farming

The Food Changemaker 2026 award does not recognise a one-off project: it recognises a way of working sustained over more than a decade. On 24 February, in Madrid, Mercedes Iborra Broseta took the stage at the Food Changemakers Awards 2026 to collect it, in the Future of Agriculture category, from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, at the gala organised by KM ZERO Food Innovation Hub.

What the Food Changemakers recognise

The Food Changemakers are run by KM ZERO Food Innovation Hub, with the collaboration of ICEX and the Royal Academy of Gastronomy, and they look for something very specific: identifying those already changing how food is produced, processed and managed, rather than those promising to. They do not reward an idea on paper, they reward an impact already measurable across the industry.

In the 2026 edition, Mercedes Iborra shares the recognition with chef Rodrigo de la Calle, awarded for his work in sustainable fine dining and for bringing seasonal produce to haute cuisine without sacrificing technical rigour, and Rodrigo García, co-founder of Notpla, recognised for his seaweed-based biodegradable packaging as a real alternative to single-use plastic in the food industry. Three different ways of tackling the same problem: how to feed people better without exhausting the resources we depend on.

The land, with real data

Mercedes Iborra was recognised, as El Debate reported, for her contribution to digitalising farming: visual soil analysis, climate risk prediction and irrigation management driven by artificial intelligence. That is no abstract description. It is, literally, the daily work behind solutions such as Sensor — the network capturing soil, plant and environmental data in real time — and AgroVRAIN, the expert AI adviser that turns that data into an alert or a recommendation someone can act on before the problem becomes irreversible.

COIAL, the official association of agricultural engineers of the Levante region, underlined when picking up the news that the recognition connects directly with precision agriculture and decision-making based on geolocated data. It is, at bottom, the thesis VisualNACert has held since it was founded: technology only earns its place if it simplifies a decision, not if it adds another layer of complexity.

From family farming to a ministry stage

What sets this trajectory apart from other agricultural digitalisation stories is the starting point. Mercedes Iborra is the third generation of a farming family: she grew up watching at close quarters the decisions taken on a real farm, rather than analysing them from outside. That direct experience — what it feels like to risk a season on an irrigation or treatment decision — is what she has carried, more than a decade later, into a technology product designed to simplify exactly that kind of decision. The setting changes, from an olive grove or a citrus field to a ministry, but the objective does not: that whoever works the land decides with better information.

An award with staying power, not an isolated headline

The Food Changemaker 2026 did not stop at a headline. Over the following days it was picked up by outlets including Revista Mercados and Alimarket, as well as by the agricultural engineering community through COIAL. That coverage matters less for the exposure itself than for what it confirms: that the work of applying AI to farming, done over years without needing to announce it every week, ends up visible anyway — and not only within the agrifood industry.

What this means for people working with agricultural data every day

For a grower, an agronomist or a cooperative manager reading this news, the underlying message is not "we have won an award". It is that applying artificial intelligence to soil, climate and irrigation with real agronomic judgement produces results that show, even to the people who design national agricultural policy. It is not a promise about the future, it is recognition of something already working on real farms, with real data, today.

A team recognition

Mercedes Iborra repeats it whenever she can: this award is not won by one person, it is won by the work of a team that has spent more than ten years structuring the industry's technical information — agronomists, developers, field technicians — so that technology reaches the grower as a simpler decision rather than as one more tool to learn.

It is the same idea she developed shortly afterwards on the KM ZERO podcast, where she spoke about generational renewal, AI and genomics applied to farming: you can read that conversation in the dedicated blog article.

What this award says about Spanish farming in 2026

The Food Changemaker 2026 arrives at a moment when the conversation about artificial intelligence in farming has stopped being an isolated promise of innovation and become a real competitiveness requirement. Spain holds an enormous agricultural area and an enormous diversity of crops, from olive groves to citrus and almonds, and the same tension repeats across all of them: ever tighter margins, ever more demanding regulation and less room for error each season. An award like this does not resolve that tension, but it confirms there is a path already producing results.

For VisualNACert, this recognition adds to a trajectory that neither begins nor ends in 2026: it is a decade of work with agronomists, technicians and real growers, building tools used in real seasons rather than in presentations. That, ultimately, is the criterion separating technology that delivers value from technology that only promises to.

And it is, above all, a validation of a very specific approach: in an industry where it is easy to promise artificial intelligence without anything changing in a farm's daily routine, this award recognises the opposite — technology that translates into an irrigation, fertilisation or crop protection decision taken with better information, season after season.

Sources

• COIAL — Mercedes Iborra (VisualNACert) receives the Food Changemaker 2026 from Minister Planas (in Spanish)
• El Debate — Food Changemakers Awards: Madrid recognises Mercedes Iborra, Rodrigo de la Calle and Rodrigo García (in Spanish)
• Revista Mercados — Food Changemakers 2026: Rodrigo de la Calle, Iborra and García (in Spanish)
• Alimarket — Mercedes Iborra, Rodrigo de la Calle and Rodrigo García receive the Food Changemakers 2026 awards (in Spanish)