Fed Talks: Agriculture and Tech
Yesterday afternoon, some of the Wool team headed off to Fed Talks in our home, The Federation. The topic was all surrounding food and agriculture with presentations from Shirley Sarker (@sarkyou) and Abby Rose (@abby_super).
First off, Shirley, designer and food lover, explored how her interest of sustainability, design, tech and platforms lead to the creation of a great solution to wide ranging problem.
In America, C.S.A (community sponsored agriculture) is a popular concept which sees a partnership between farmers and consumers where people give upfront cash to farmers for produce, taking on the risk of the farmer.
After a trip to California, Shirley returned looking for a wealth of produce, only to find all of the same products, everywhere.
So, with the idea that it’s hard to be a farmer, she went off to Hyper Island to pitch her idea and explored farmers issues. The issues include wanting to work directly with consumers not middlemen.
On the other side of the table, chefs are a great way to bring new foods to light and they have a similar problem of struggling to find farmers to work with.
From this, Northern Heritage created ‘Sprouter’ which brings together chefs and farmers — allowing farmers to implement the C.S.A model to fund new produce and see what you have funded, and so, helping new products come to market.
Next up, Abby explored how her family moved to Chile ten years ago to start a farm and how Abby and her sister now sell their produce in the UK.
Being on a farm helped to show the underlying despair of agriculture, especially thanks to the late frost for the past 3 years causing havoc on the trees and lack of knowing which trees were affected. To fix this, Abby created ‘Sector Mentor’ where you can enter information about trees such as when they have last been affected and if they have had any yield, after gaining two years of data, they can now make ‘tree by tree’ commercial decisions.
This product worked so well that a neighbouring farm asked for a similar solution, ‘Work Mentor’ so they could see exactly what their team were doing and have a great grasp of what is going on at all times.
Abby presented the idea that every decision a farmer makes has an impact upon the environment, helping to propel the importance of the agricultural trade even more; moreover, she presented the idea that there are only a predicted 60 harvests left due to soil conditions.
It was great to hear how both women have used tech to influence agriculture and create solutions which may have great positive impact.
We loved attending the Fed Talk and can’t wait for the next one!
