About the Client
Care4Growing is a ‘virtual assistant’ in the Agriculture/Horticulture industry that combines both existing and new services, such as managing growers’ cultivations, consulting market prices, or communicating with other growers, producers organisations and other service providers. This collaborative, multifunctional platform provides proactive support throughout the cultivation process for over 3,000 producers in Belgium.
Thanks to the digitisation of various processes and continuous data collection, Care4Growing ensures that every grower has a mobile tool that supports them in their daily tasks and makes their work all the more efficient.
Challenges
Our client’s main mission was to create a network around and between crop growers. The idea was to make the cooperation between them better and easier, as well as to build a direct link between them and the service providers.
Outside of ensuring that the growers have the means to receive better support from the partners, Care4Growing focuses on developing a long-term strategy to protect food supplies. The challenge of the project was designing a robust platform with the core functionality of data collection, which gives the client the necessary insights to make sure the right improvements can be implemented in real-time and allows its users to network easily with each other.
Solution
With Salesforce Experience Cloud and Service Cloud, the Waeg team created a community that can be accessed either through a computer or a smartphone app and also acts as a smart assistant.
In a broad sense, the app helps growers by simplifying and improving their administration and organisation. The community acts as an ecosystem for growers and producer organisations to collaborate better and share knowledge, e.g. how to deal with pests and crop diseases, which crop treatments work best, what is the maximum volume etc. This gives the growers complex, daily support.
Results
Thanks to Care4Growing, growers can reach out for advice on crops or for technical support, either from the app or the web browser. The producer organisations can support them via different channels of their choosing.
The app keeps prices and sales up to date in real-time in chosen segments, manages plots, follows up on harvests, plans treatments and fertilisation check samples, etc. It learns more and more every day which means it’s getting more helpful over time. The end goal for the app is to have 100 functions that will support growers in many different areas.
Growers are not the only ones supported by Care4Growing. Partner organisations also have access to data collected by growers to give them insights into market trends while simultaneously tracking crop data. Through monitoring a vast pool of centralised data, a lot can be learned. For instance, the evolution of diseases and plagues, or which crops will be in demand to help reduce food waste and balance supply. This allows to identify and take the necessary steps that will focus on food supply protection.
Conclusion
Data is key in order to keep up with the changes of the ever-evolving world, especially in the agricultural sector, which has tobear the brunt of the climate change effects that get more intense and drastic with each passing day.
The Salesforce platform helps farmers to grow better crops and to optimise their production process by extracting complex and correct data and by accessing a more adaptable growing model that is essential for the horticulture and agriculture industries of tomorrow.
Implemented solutions were a success, and currently, the community has more than 1000 active users that can share knowledge with each other daily, which gives all the needed support for growers.
