Agriculture is the world’s largest industry. It forms the backbone of economies and plays an essential role in sustaining life, with more farmers recognising their role as stewards and protectors of the countryside, its wildlife, and natural habitats.
As one of the world’s biggest polluters, the industry has come under increasing scrutiny for creating pollution, contaminating water systems with pesticides, causing biodiversity loss, and depleting soil health. Vitally, sustainable operations can preserve and restore environments. In the UK, the Soil Association Exchange (SAX) and their team of agricultural experts support farmers to run more sustainable, and profitable, farms that will last.
AMBITION
Sowing the seeds for more sustainable farming practices
SAX was helping their advisors collect farm metrics, sustainability and biodiversity data to both measure progress and identify actions needed to improve things, but the process was very manual. SAX wanted to give farmers the tools they needed to measure their progress easily and more regularly, in improving the performance of their farms agroecoclogically, and financially, using more automation and remote monitoring. Not only would this save time and money, but it would help farmers see the impact of sustainable farming methods and regenerative land use for themselves.
ACTION
Measuring the environmental and social impacts of farming
We rolled up our sleeves and got stuck into research sessions with SAX teams and farmers. We worked collaboratively to put ourselves in the boots of our users and understand the type of challenges they faced. As we dug deeper into the data, we learned that the biggest barriers preventing farmers from taking on more agroecological practices were a lack of time and being unable to see noticeable benefits.
We quickly realised the Exchange’s platform needed to have easy and seamless data tracking and reporting processes. This would help farmers clearly see, experience, and reap the very real benefits of adopting more sustainable practices on their farms.
Our teams designed and tested a new user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) on their platform that allowed farmers to capture and interpret high-quality data. We used this prototype to embed automation and linked it back to how farmers were getting value from the data they’d gathered.
We worked with the Exchange to evaluate potential vendors they could partner with to make data collection easier and more accurate for farmers. Our teams provided SAX with a list of vendors, along with analysis on how the organisation could partner with, or learn from them, to achieve their goals. These included cutting-edge start-ups that use satellites to track data, and companies that build small robots which can monitor plants, sample soil, and even kill weeds.
ACHIEVEMENT
Helping farmers become more profitable and sustainable
Since its launch, the newly designed platform has been rolled out to 850 more farms across the U.K. The research we conducted has created a more actionable and regular feedback loop in the platform. This will go on to help farmers better track the impact of sustainable practices on their farms and help preserve and restore critical habitats.
Our work with SAX uncovered opportunities for organisations in other sectors to use similar data tracking and reporting processes to improve traceability, create greater transparency, and drive action in their supply chains.
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We used design thinking and new technology to support the Exchange’s goal of helping farmers unearth deeper insights about their farms and discover new financial opportunities that will help them make the move to more sustainable farming practices, and create a better future for all.
