Public Funding for Cropdesk Technologies Limited

**The UK farming industry employs up to 90,000 seasonal workers** at peak, to grow and harvest its crops. Employees converge on farms from all over the world, and a high proportion will move from farm to farm over a 6 to 8-month period. The transient nature of such employees can make it very difficult for an employer to confidently control the risk of a COVID outbreak, especially where it is expected that multiple occupation accommodation is provided with a job. In addition, employers are required to provide detailed training and inductions for new employees, which involves multiple touch points and involves large quantities of paper records moving around the business. An average fruit or vegetable farm has about 300 people working and living there in harvest season, in caravans of 4 or 6 people. On arrival, new workers go through an induction process to register their details and submit identity paperwork before undertaking a minimum of 1-week training. **Government guidance related to COVID-19 has required employers** to increase the amount of records kept for these employees, normally filed as paper records, increasing the level of induction and training. **Impacts/challenges:** * The ability to fast-track effective induction and to track the location and movement of workers, which has never been important, is now essential to assure that farms are COVID-compliant. The logistics technology to manage this new paradigm, and to help recover/maintain/grow farming productivity levels, does not yet exist. * 60% of farms do not keep digital reports (Agrimetrics, 2020). Most farms use spreadsheets and manual records for this extra burden and, should a COVID outbreak occur, whole farms would need to be shut down, which prevents the time-sensitive crop being harvested and would potentially have a catastrophic impact on the business. * Teams of 40 are a traditional average to be operated by 1 supervisor in the fields. COVID requirements have led to a reduced quantity of workers in each team, requiring more supervisors, leading to less efficiency/productivity. Farming operations are under huge pressure from supermarkets to produce more food, from the same land, for the same cost; but costs continue to rise, and running an efficient business is critical to sustainability. * This leads to potential increased commercial unsustainability of farms, job losses in rural communities and disruption to UK food supply chain (NFU et al, 2020). We will build a unique web and smartphone application. This product allows an employer to manage their workforce on farms in a COVID-safe way, without the extra administration burden and providing extra technology to increase efficiency, even on pre-COVID levels. Any induction and training which does not require face-to-face interaction will be provided in a self-service mobile app. Accommodation is allocated and recorded, and small teams of workers are created and tracked using 'households' by accommodation. Workers will be provided with a mobile app which includes automatic track-and-trace technology whilst on the farm, enabling swift control of small cells and avoiding complete shutdown if a COVID outbreak occurs.

**Specific need:** T**he UK farming industry requires up to 90,000 seasonal workers** at peak, to grow and harvest its crops. The labour to grow our crops has, for the last 30 years, traditionally come from Eastern Europe, as seasonal migrant workers. COVID-19 restrictions on movement of people and global lockdown of transport infrastructure currently prevents them from returning. At the same time, claims for Universal Credit in the UK surged to 950,000 since the -COVID-19 lockdown. The UK is suffering job losses on a scale and speed un-precedented even after a global financial collapse. It is expected that the unemployment rate will rise from 3.9% pre pandemic to 5.2% in April, further in May and June. There is a significant potential UK workforce, likely to want to engage to resolve this key worker crisis. Providing the infrastructure needed to connect farmers with this resource is a sector priority. **Innovation:** A unique mobile recruitment app and cloud application which takes details of applicants, pre-checks them for suitability, and offers them to farm subscribers by matching answers to set questions. Employer selects which worker(s) to offer work to, using redacted data and supplies information on their farm and jobs offered. On acceptance, the worker's full details are passed directly to the employer and their contract begins. The app pushes a periodic satisfaction survey to both employee and employer which acts as a 2-way review. Employers notify the system when a contract ends. Through this PCR extension, applicants will be able to view a collated video about the job they are being offered which will be part of a growing collection of stock interviews with people actually doing various jobs over a period of time. This is innovative in that it is managing potential employees expectations in a different way than is currently available and provides greater engagement between employers and applicants and less recruitment churn. An extension will also allow the project to create and split test multiple social media campaigns to attract applicants and automate those wherever possible. This enhances potential engagement with unemployed domestic workers and increases the availability of workers for available jobs. This is innovative because it creates a more targeted and automated solution to a currently manual and protracted process. **Delivery:** Cropdesk has been operating in the technology market for 5yrs, focussing on technology, with a CEO who is a soft fruit farmer himself of over 30 years. We have multiple initial routes to market: * Through Cropdesk's customers and contacts including Berry Gardens Ltd, the UK's largest soft fruit cooperative * Through Enterprise Europe Network connections and overseas partners and the Knowledge Transfer Network, with potential sector support through the Knowledge Transfer Network * To applicants through a national social media campaign and potentially the DWP

There is increasing consumer and retailer demand for high-quality UK-grown strawberries, and this will increase further post-BREXIT as retailers favour British produce. Currently, c. 30% (Defra) of strawberries consumed in the UK are imported, and so there is a great opportunity to displace these, often inferior, imports during the home-grown season and boost the UK economy. However, achieving consistently high yields and quality across variable and challenging growing seasons is difficult, and new growing innovations are needed if UK fruit production is to be optimised to meet market demand, and imports reduced. There is much variability in plant yield and berry quality over a typical covered table-top production system, but the reasons for this are not fully understood and the magnitude of the effect has not been satisfactorily quantified, and so it cannot be managed or predicted. This variability confounds growers' best efforts to forecast yields to inform marketing strategies, and inaccurate forecasts lead to under-supply or to surpluses, necessitating purchases from outside the UK or fruit destruction, both of which are very costly. We will develop new soft fruit growing strategies from an improved understanding of how to optimise individual plant performance across the growing area. We will refine recently-developed fruit harvest and ripening models by incorporating high resolution, satellite-derived weather inputs, and data feeds will be used to inform growers' polytunnel venting strategies to better control growing conditions. Variable ripening rates and yields will be captured using a new app, and algorithms will be developed and embedded in a cloud-based BerryPredictor tool that will enable growers to forecast yields with much greater accuracy and precision than currently possible, across the entire cropping area. BerryPredictor will also provide POs and UK growers with access to real-time accurate yield prediction profiles for the first time. The majority of the R&D work will be carried out at the NIAB Water Efficient Technologies (WET) Centre, an industry-funded soft fruit precision growing demonstration and KE centre, the remit of which is to showcase the latest innovations in soft fruit growing, and promote the commercialisation of project outputs from our IUK and industry-funded projects. BGG commercial growers will provide weather data to inform the models, and yield data to ground-truth BerryPredictor. Project outputs will benefit UK growers (yield, premium price, import substitution), POs (better product with enhanced reputation, reliability and improved marketability), supermarkets and consumers (flavoursome, phytonutritious UK-grown fruit) and wider society (sustainable intensification).