Smallholder Monitoring
GRAS supports efficient and credible smallholder certification processes and allows a secure integration of smallholders into sustainable supply chains.
- How can Smallholders become part of a sustainable and certified supply chain?
- How can Smallholders be mapped and monitored? The GRAS mobile app is the solution!
- How can smallholders be managed and traced back to field level?
GRAS provides tools to facilitate the integration of smallholders into sustainable supply chains
Until today, the majority of the world’s farms are managed by independent smallholders. Altogether, those small farms operate around 80% of the world’s agricultural land. Unfortunately, in some cases, low yields and incomes combined with lack of market and financial access may increase the risk of deforestation and biodiversity loss.
Including smallholders into sustainable supply chains provides an opportunity to reduce poverty, ensure stable living standards, and increase yields. In addition, investments in family-run agriculture has the potential to reduce the pressure on natural resources and deforestation. However, the integration of smallholders into sustainable supply chains is difficult due to the complexity of supply chains and limited information. The location of smallholders is often unknown and traceability a big challenge for downstream supply chain actors. Against this background, GRAS has developed new and user-friendly tools which allow facilitated mapping, tracking and monitoring of smallholders and enable to trace back raw material to smallholder field level.
Independent Smallholder App
As smallholder locations are often unknown, the GRAS Independent Smallholder App allows to capture the field’s polygons of each smallholder directly onsite without any required experience in geodata processing and programming. Field outlines and other collected data (e.g. geotagged photos, management practices, social and economic information) can subsequently be uploaded to a secure database and are automatically checked against deforestation and protected areas. With the development of the GRAS Independent Smallholder App, GRAS supports efficient and credible smallholder certification processes by enabling the efficient management, analysis, and visualisation of smallholder data.
Tracking App
To tackle the challenge of smallholder traceability, data on single deliveries (e.g. fresh fruit bunches) can be collected through the GRAS Tracking App. This way, each delivery can be traced back down to the respective smallholder field.
All collected data can be accessed in a user-friendly smallholder management dashboard, which allows to monitor individual smallholder yields over time, to check the collected field outlines against environmental risks and to identify potential areas for improvement measures.
