An online marketplace which helps farmers find the best price for produce has received a grant from the Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative.
FutureFarm (www.futurefarm.ag) is a mobile trading platform which has been developed to provide an online marketplace to match demand with supply at scale, automatically seeking out suppliers/buyers for a farm’s produce at the best price possible at the time.
A grant of £60,000 has been awarded from the Eastern Agri-Tech scheme. The Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative is run by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority with support from New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, Norfolk County Council, Cambridgeshire County Council, and the local authorities covering this area.
This will fund further development to allow farmers to export their produce to Middle Eastern and Asian markets. The technology will incorporate processes around compliance, regulation and logistics to enable cost-efficient and compliant selling of UK farm outputs.
A successful pilot of the software earlier this year with UK top five agricultural buying group Fram Farmers saw the group’s trading desks achieve £4.5m of trading via the software.
FutureFarm’s founder, Robert Alston, says that the software is designed to address a number of problems.
“The farmer is the least profitable participant in the food chain, UK farm productivity is roughly half of that of France and Germany and agriculture sits at the bottom of the league table when it comes to adopting digital technology,” he says.
“The difference FutureFarm provides is the ability of the farmer to trade his produce seeing bids and offers across the market in real time. Rather than phone calls to a farmer from the merchant and a lack of price transparency, the farmer will be able to sell fresh produce over the platform with local and international merchants bidding for it.”
Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative grants are available to organisations looking to improve productivity and efficiency through investment in specialist equipment, new market and supply chain development and the application of Research and Development. Find out more about the grants here.
For more information about FutureFarm, visit https://www.futurefarm.ag/
