89145Agricultural HR - Protecting migrant workers and employers post pandemicClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UK**The UK farming industry employs up to 90,000 seasonal workers** at peak, to grow and harvest its crops. Employees converge on farms from all over the world, and a high proportion will move from farm to farm over a 6 to 8-month period. The transient nature of such employees can make it very difficult for an employer to confidently control the risk of a COVID outbreak, especially where it is expected that multiple occupation accommodation is provided with a job. In addition, employers are required to provide detailed training and inductions for new employees, which involves multiple touch points and involves large quantities of paper records moving around the business. An average fruit or vegetable farm has about 300 people working and living there in harvest season, in caravans of 4 or 6 people. On arrival, new workers go through an induction process to register their details and submit identity paperwork before undertaking a minimum of 1-week training. **Government guidance related to COVID-19 has required employers** to increase the amount of records kept for these employees, normally filed as paper records, increasing the level of induction and training. **Impacts/challenges:** * The ability to fast-track effective induction and to track the location and movement of workers, which has never been important, is now essential to assure that farms are COVID-compliant. The logistics technology to manage this new paradigm, and to help recover/maintain/grow farming productivity levels, does not yet exist. * 60% of farms do not keep digital reports (Agrimetrics, 2020). Most farms use spreadsheets and manual records for this extra burden and, should a COVID outbreak occur, whole farms would need to be shut down, which prevents the time-sensitive crop being harvested and would potentially have a catastrophic impact on the business. * Teams of 40 are a traditional average to be operated by 1 supervisor in the fields. COVID requirements have led to a reduced quantity of workers in each team, requiring more supervisors, leading to less efficiency/productivity. Farming operations are under huge pressure from supermarkets to produce more food, from the same land, for the same cost; but costs continue to rise, and running an efficient business is critical to sustainability. * This leads to potential increased commercial unsustainability of farms, job losses in rural communities and disruption to UK food supply chain (NFU et al, 2020). We will build a unique web and smartphone application. This product allows an employer to manage their workforce on farms in a COVID-safe way, without the extra administration burden and providing extra technology to increase efficiency, even on pre-COVID levels. Any induction and training which does not require face-to-face interaction will be provided in a self-service mobile app. Accommodation is allocated and recorded, and small teams of workers are created and tracked using 'households' by accommodation. Workers will be provided with a mobile app which includes automatic track-and-trace technology whilst on the farm, enabling swift control of small cells and avoiding complete shutdown if a COVID outbreak occurs.