TECHNOLOGY
AgriSmart was created by Australian Charles Morgan after he got stuck in New Zealand during the covid lockdown in 2020. The AgriSmart team.
A smart solution By Samantha Tennent
A new software programme will enable farmers to manage their businesses and teams better, as well as meeting various rules and regulations easily.
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fter being stranded in New Zealand during the 2020 lockdown, Australian Charles Morgan and his partner decided to stay put and started looking for innovative software companies for potential work. He was keen on the agricultural sector and came across AgriSmart during his search. “We were on our way to France when covid struck and changed our plans,” Morgan says. “But I knew New Zealand had a strong primary sector driving its economy and I had been looking at global trends where I found a common theme between managing costs and increasing insights into ground-level business, as well as the growing interest in employee welfare.”
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He has a background in software from previous roles in Australia and could see the potential software could offer to combine those elements from the global trends. “I was keen to explore something technical that combines a few different aspects within a business,” he says. “Things like payroll, finance, workforce management and health and safety, because it’s not just about paying staff correctly anymore – we need more information for the full management of employees. “How do we manage their pay, their costs, their tasks, their health and safety, their welfare? And, it needs to be easy, managing in a single platform instead of being paper documents or a mixture of different logins.”
The AgriSmart concept made sense to him; it consolidates the different people management elements into one place, to help create clarity and drive efficiency for farmers. He also advocates for understanding the why behind things, particularly with more compliance hitting farmers. “There’s a lot of frustrations around regulation and meeting compliance, but I think sometimes we need to remember it’s the consumers and supermarkets within the supply chain that are driving these global shifts – and it’s not just happening in New Zealand,” he says. “Customers want a better understanding of who is supplying products and we need better systems and software to meet those requirements.”
DAIRY FARMER
March 2022
