Comprehensive digital farmer information system

In a nutshell

Our client is a global $11B food and beverage ingredient supplier. They wanted to help their customers meet increasing consumer demands for sustainable sourcing and healthy foods. However, getting reliable and timely data from farmers and farms was a continuous business challenge they faced.

Here’s how we helped them turn this challenge into an opportunity.

We created an integrated digital platform to collect, process and analyze first hand information about farmers, and enable implementation and tracking of sustainability programs. This ultimately led to reinventing the client’s sourcing operations.

The impact

500K+ farmers’ participation across 1M+ surveys

70+ sustainability programs implemented and being monitored

100K+ farm development plans executed

Metrics tracking of ESG goals, notably those impacting child labor monitoring and remediation

What our clients say

The solution helps identify missing and incorrect sustainable practices. It allows us to see our strengths and weaknesses about farmers.

Senior Sustainability Coordinator, Middle East, olam food ingredients

This solution is a very attractive tool for engaging donors. And, because it is inherently a data platform it can automatically provide them with the data ‘proof’ of activity that they need.

Vice President,Corporate Sustainability, Asia Pacific, olam food ingredients

Getting into the details

About the client

The client is a global $11B company with widespread operations across 60+ countries. Their business operations involve sourcing, processing, and distributing food ingredients and agricultural commodities to a wide customer base.

The problem

Lack of centralized database and metrics tracking

The client wanted to help their customers in meeting increasing consumer demands for sustainable sourcing and healthy foods. The following pain points were proving to be a challenge:

Lack of reliable production and supply data from farmers

Limited access to farm-level information in remote areas

Limited best practice sharing with farmers

Absence of sustainability metrics, like first-mile sourcing, child labor usage, etc.

Our solution

The thought process: Build a digital application to capture real-time farm and farmer level data for sustainability metrics tracking.

We created an integrated platform to collect, process and analyze information about farmers and first-mile sourcing. The platform provides a comprehensive view of all the farming activities and doubles up as a single source of data, leading to -

● higher traceability, and

● improved yield

In addition, the reliable insights have helped the client in extending their full support towards critical sustainability programs, such as child labor reduction.

The solution includes:

01 A mobile application for farmers and on-ground field agents

The app facilitates farmer registration, training, and GPS-based farm shape and size recording.
The end benefit is reliable data on farms, farmers, the social infrastructure, usage of child labor, and the first-mile of the supply chain.

02 A web portal for business users providing data insights and farm management plans

The data from the mobile application is processed and analyzed to create a comprehensive data hub of farmer information and supply data.
Through this platform, business teams receive personalized dashboards, farmer overviews, farm location and shape/size, and farm development plans.
The platform analyzes and integrates multiple data sets to produce data visualizations rapidly.
The statistical analysis interface and user-friendly configurable reports provides data-driven advisory on farm management and helps to create customized training for farmers