Meet Blueberry farmers Marcela & Jorge: Reducing a three hour weekly task to minutes.
Marcela and Jorge run a family business growing and propagating blueberries and other fruits in the Central Region, Chile.
They grow many different varieties of blueberries to better understand how the plants fair in a commercial setting in Chile and they also have a multi-acre blueberry farm, it’s important to Marcela and Jorge that they are both farmers and propagators as then they understand the reality of growing fruit, not just creating plants. They have successfully built up their family business and one thing that is noticeable walking around their farm is the conviviality of all the workers. Their good humour is reflected everywhere. We are very excited to be partnering with them in the field to support their work as independent farmers and growers.
During harvest, they always used paper and poker chips to record quantities picked, it required the manager to spend a few hours at the end of the week entering these numbers into a spreadsheet. Last year they switched to Workmentor to record how much each worker picked. Their workers love it, as do they! It saves them lots of time and makes it easier to pay workers. They have many fewer errors than before, plus it’s easy to sort any disputes because they have a trusted record of everything that happened.
They are also starting to use Workmentor to manage their day to day timesheets as it’s an easy way for workers to log their hours on the go and record how long they spend on each task which is key for pay, understanding production costs and estimating workload. This is a new feature we have added to better support worker-farmer relationships and smooth administration.
Here is what Benjamin the blueberries manager has to say about using Workmentor:
“It saved me hours and hours of time as I can quickly and easily see amounts every week for every person. It’s a very systematic way of getting data, there is not much room for mistakes. There is good traceability of who did what and when. We use it with no trouble at all with our regular workers and get good feedback from people that they trust the system. For example, we had a difference in kg between what one worker thought they had picked and what we thought they had picked. To resolve this we went and looked through Workmentor, it was clear minute by minute who had harvested what so we added it up there and she went away happy.”
Based on picking rates they were also able to visualise which blueberry varieties were ripe, when, and their picking density over time, which are key factors when thinking about the commercial viability of a crop.
Interested in how Workmentor could work for you, you can read more about it here, or contact us here
