Feed the Nation! The Land Army needs you!

As the workforce stays home and many companies have already started to collapse, farms find themselves in need of tens of thousands of workers to harvest the food the nation needs. The British Growers Association estimates the UK needs 70,000 seasonal workers this year to help get this harvest in.   Without these workers, it is just not possible to get the food out of the ground and into our supply chain, potentially resulting in food shortages.

There have been calls around the country for a way to connect farms with potential workers, but no network has existed to rapidly deploy large numbers of workers to where they are needed.

Many companies are working out how they can help during the COVID-19 pandemic with some brilliant stories of reusing knowledge and technology.  UK based Home Grown  has quickly produced the Land Army initiative, utilising their existing mapping technology and has launched it today.

The aim of the Land Army is to make the workforce and employers accessible to each other within minutes, minimising disruption to production and, wherever possible, keeping people in work. Farms and workers can put themselves on a map and see where local opportunities are.  This method takes out the need for lengthy recruitment processes and centralised vetting from agencies, leaving the farms to recruit at the speed required.

Edwina Mullins, Vice-Chair of #clubhectare, said: “Helping our domestic sustainability is crucial. We have many people in the country out of work, especially in the hospitality, construction and retail industries. At the same time, we have farms desperate for workers. In these disruptive times, we all need new ways of thinking to keep food on our plates during this difficult time.”