British Herb Conference 2023 is a month away!

The British Growers Association’s British Herbs Technical Conference is only one month away! The speaker line up looks great and there seems to be a lot of interesting topics on display. Based on the Wellesbourne Campus, at the University of Warwick. One of the several sessions that might grab a lot of attention, is the 10am talk with NFU Energy. The energy costs are going up, and there is no indication as to if they will return to normal. This is going to drastically increase the cost-per-crop, and supermarket chains and their customers, are not going to take on all the costs. You need to be smarter with your costings, and find ways to cut costs, without reduced quality. It will be interesting to see what they propose as a solution. There are some ways you can reduce costs long term, using automation and software. 

Labour costs and shortages 

One of the ways to save money, actually comes in the form of another issue the industry is facing. The labour shortage is making it hard to hire people, but even when you can, the wages are usually the biggest costs to a business. Automating as many tasks as you can means you don’t need a large workforce. There are autonomous vehicles that are a hefty upfront cost, but long term could free up 5 people’s worth of labour; depending on the work. Sensors that give you live data, and drones that perform crop walks. You can set the points of the field you want the drone to go to, without requiring any piloting. 

Hardware and software integration 

The initial costs for technology solutions may seem high, but will be crucial for long term sustainability. Manual labour jobs are just not attracting UK citizens, and Brexit has made employing European labour harder. The freedom of movement is not coming back in the foreseeable future, so the agriculture and horticulture industries are going to have to use creative solutions. Hardware and software costs will even out, and actually save you money year on year in lost hours. Automating data collection, packing, and harvesting, will dramatically reduce your labour costs. LiveFarmer is a farm management software built for integration. Sensors can send information directly to LiveFarmer, which is documented to the correct job.