Industry 4.0 – Traceable Agri-Food Supply Chains

Let’s see how supply chain traceability has helped farmers, suppliers or wholesalers, retailers, and consumers

Agriculture is a primary need for any country, and making sure the agriculture industry is as optimized as possible will be of good interest to any nation. When it comes to the growth, storage, transport, and security of agriculture, supply chain management and traceability become imperative. Over the recent past, agriculture has seen significant development due to the implementation of technology that assists farmers, suppliers, and retailers in enhancing their productivity.

Supply Chain Traceability from Mobile Phones for Farmers

Agriculture begins at farms with the farmers & growers, and so does the supply chain of food.

Farmers are now moving from traditional farming methods, tracking crop growth, harvesting, and shipping and moving towards modern methods backed by technology and innovations, making it all easier to meet perpetual growing demands. Modern technology not only offers better results, reduced labor costs, farming accuracy, but it also enables farmers to anticipate and cut risks when it comes to pricing, storage, food spoilage, shipping, seedtime, to name a few.

The supply chain solutions integrated at the Mobile phones enables farmers to be able to keep track of almost all the operations of the farm. For instance, a farmer can input the seed time of the crops and, in a jiff, get an estimated date for harvesting. Farmers track every step of the harvest once they have shipped it to the supplier anywhere in the world. Supply chain traceability will make it easy for farmers to keep track of pesticides, fertilizers, and other resources used through a mobile device right from their field including advisory support like pest and disease control, monetary financial loans and also provides a digital platform to trade with buyers directly at current market rates.

Fresh Produce Traceability

Well, this is not about applying a QR code or Smart label to the packed fruit or vegetable. Most countries follow strict guidelines to handle fresh produce using traceability softwares for end-to-end food safety & transparency.

Minimising gaps is vital to reduce the risk exposure of your business and digital traceable value chain is a solution. Any breach in the traceability chain becomes an unnecessary expense. AgTech SaaS companies can now provide 100% accuracy of information throughout the life-cycle of fresh produce, from pre-planting, to post sales, thereby the global guidelines for trade and traceability are adhered. This also ensures minimizing any compliance costs.

DATAGREEN software provides a strong platform for accurate recording, tracking and digitizing the traceability records of fresh fruits and vegetable produce, via a variety of farm management and traceability methods. High traceability opens new markets for fresh produce, and enhances customer confidence in product quality.

International practice standards for fresh produce traceability such as BRC, GlobalGAP, ISO, HACCP, CanGAP, EuroGAP, (and many more) are supported by these agtech digital solutions, in turn these make audits and any compliance smooth, error free and less expensive.

The second most important value chain actors: Suppliers and Wholesalers

Constantly growing consumer demand has the agriculture industry looking for cheap, fast, accurate, dependable, and most importantly, well-streamlined alternatives. Suppliers and wholesalers are now implementing data-driven supply chain traceability to obtain better predictability that mitigates risk and is crucial in cost-cutting. Furthermore, supply chain traceability enables suppliers or wholesalers to track their products start-to-end; means a supplier can know which farm the product came from, what chemicals were used to grow the product, where the product was stored and in what conditions, where the product is to be shipped, and much more.

Post COVID how supply chains are transforming?

Over 30% of food produced goes to waste every year due to the supply chain’s inefficiency, theft, contamination, or improper storage. When it comes to food wastage or spoilage in metros and sub-urban areas, the numbers are relatively low due to the availability of facilities. Efficient supply chain, streamlining food chain and offering suppliers or wholesalers the option to track their shipment, storage, and more.

End of the Chain: The Consumer

The Internet has rendered the power of knowledge at the fingertips of consumers. Consumers have become health conscious and want to, in detail, everything they are buying and eating. Consequently, food demands are shifting to more wholesome, organic products. If not all, most consumers want to be sure what they are consuming has been manufactured with proper hygiene, fair pricing, purity, ingredients, and safety.

This kind of demand has propelled agricultural companies to adopt supply chain traceability to fulfill customers’ expectations, offer flexibility to consumers, and enhance their own brand value. The transparency on the customer end that enables them to know all about a product brings immense value and significantly builds trust in the organization. Furthermore, the supply chain transparency allows an organization to quickly recall any discrepancy found in the supply chain that may impact the outcome quality or price, guarding consumer trust in the brand.

With consumers’ digital footprints, companies can glean consumer behaviors and preferences related to their product and adjust their sail accordingly in the ocean of competitors to keep ahead with the competitors, keep up with the current trends or even create a trend that influences customers to follow.

In a nutshell the primary factors that why Supply Chains are going digital are:

● Drive Value with Improved Visibility
Quantify, and analyze data to achieve visibility into field operations and actionable insights.

● Superior Resource Management
Real-time data-based assignment of tasks, inspections and operational activities.

● Efficient use of Agri-Inputs
Optimize inputs, curb costs and slash misuse and wastages of consumable inputs such as High-grade seeds, Soil, Fertilizers, Insecticides , Pesticides, Insect Traps, Straw/Hay and to some extent irrigation water usage.

● Mitigate Risks
Leverage insights, alerts and data-backed recommendations to identify any supply chain issues(food recalls, frauds) as early as possible.

Supply Chain traceability is being predicted to be used innovatively and aggressively in agriculture and food business owing to the susceptibility of the value chains exposed by COVID19 worldover. Technology makes the entire supply chain efficient, cuts labor costs, mitigates risks concerning security, transportation, and much more. Above all it makes farming efficient for growers, decision based middle men(suppliers and wholesalers) and more transparent for consumers.

SourceTrace's software solutions have been deployed across 37 countries and 4 continents already. We are on a mission to make agriculture and food systems more sustainable. Get in touch and we will extend our expertise and commitment to you.

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