We recently discussed Agritech and the impact that technology has on the agriculture industry. Climate change and a growing global population with rising incomes means that the UK and the world are facing unprecedented challenges in terms of agricultural supply.

The strain on the industry is growing which in turn is leading to investment in technological innovations that can help increase yield and efficiencies and reduce input and environmental costs.Success it seems, lies in the digitisation of the agricultural industry to deliver the efficiencies and information we need to meet those demands. Factors like production, trace-ability, the preservation of natural resources and protecting the environment are just a few ways that technology is helping, so it’s little surprise that the UK AgriTech market is growing and embracing the benefits of digitisation. Whether its improved monitoring and detection of crop productivity, optimising farming practices or audit and supply chain trace-ability – a sector which is ‘traditional’ in its nature, is adapting quickly and harnessing the cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Data, both historic and newly acquired can be brought together to better inform us about what farming techniques to use to get the ultimate yield – which pesticide to use, what fertilisers are optimal in certain environments – and bring about the efficiencies the industry is seeking.

AgriFood Tech business Muddy Boots has already acknowledged the huge benefits that technology can bring when enabling its customers to pass data up and down the supply chain from farm to retailer to view, manage and report on the quality, trace-ability and compliance of their products, sites and suppliers. Its cloud-based SaaS solutions have captured over 19 million checks for customers in quality control on products and/or facilities and it expects this to exponentially increase as the company grows. The use of professional agriculture mobile applications is growing fast – but this growth relies upon a consolidated cross-platform mobile strategy and this is where Godel’s software development skills have been retained to help Muddy Boots deliver.

Built on Microsoft’s Xamarin technology Godel is helping the company engineer a single mobile solution for Android, iOS and Windows, allowing Muddy Boots to retire legacy applications and scale its business across new markets and developing geographies. The business is growing rapidly across international markets and our developers are providing a dedicated resource to deliver its strategy across all three mobile platforms. The consolidation also means that it’s much easier to support the technology too, simplifying things enormously.

Like many of our clients, Muddy Boots requires the development skills to maintain ‘business as usual’ whilst having experienced senior software developers to ramp up projects which help rapidly scale a digital business and deliver a world-class user experience for its customers. The gains are tremendous in terms of intelligent management of food from farm to fork, as well as the opening up of new developing markets for the company.

However, more widely as digitisation of the sector takes hold, some of the enormous challenges the sector faces are possible to solve with faster more efficient technology, data and decision making at our fingertips.