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The Agriculture industry alone is responsible for 9% of GHG (green house gasses) emitted in the UK and 30% on a global level. With the world population rising by 1.1% year on year, the need for food and sustainable supply chains will only continue to surge.

Our CEO, Rob Ward along with Dr Victoria Hatton (COP26) and Peter Wren-HIlton (Wharf42), introduced GroundUp.Earth - a transformative project aimed to tackle urgent climate challenges and leading to the AgriFoodTech Summit at COP26.

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What is GroundUp.Earth and how will it work?

It's a really exciting time in history for the Food and Farming industries. Rob spoke at the Oxford Farming Conference at the beginning of the year about collaboration, however, true collaboration is hard to achieve. Most of us work in silos, be it as a business, government and so forth. How can real collaboration between entities be achieved?

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GroundUp is building a platform to enable everyone anywhere from the Food and Farming industries or interested in the space to join. GroundUp is not solely about climate change. It’s about solving problems for farming and food industry that can include climate change. Economic sustainability can only be achieved hand in hand with environmental sustainability. The platform will enable problem solving globally and combining resources to improve productivity and profitability, while lowering carbon foot print.

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The GroundUp platform will measure and reward collaboration on an individual level. Each member/ team will have a rating. Imagine this rating as a credit score with money, except, here we're talking about how good you are at collaborative problem solving. It is similar to a crowdfunding model but for problem solving. The rating starts at zero for all, be it a researcher, investor, founder, farmer etc. and it builds up depending on three key ways of contribution.

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1. Connector.

We've all met people that have a great network but also, a very valuable network - connectors. And often we need to be introduced to the right person in order to fix a problem. How many great connections can someone introduce to the platform that will be of great value? The receiver of the introduction decides the value of each connection.

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2. Contributor.

How much can someone contribute and help the team to solve a specific problem? This is the second pillar or earning rating - a personal contribution that has a big positive impact on a given problem. Working together, each member decides how problem solvers score.

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3. Re-thinker.

It takes one person to think outside the box and spot a flaw in a problem-solving process. A good rethink is valued by the whole team and each team decides the score earned.

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How are problems proposed and solved?

GroundUp will encourage members to solve the problems proposed as a community, not individually. An individual, a company or an institution could propose a problem of various matter, concerning the Food and Agriculture industries. Each problem will have a prize of either cash or equity which will be distributed to the entire team that work on that problem.

Once the proposer of the problem is satisfied it is solved, accrued points by the whole crowd working on that one problem are distributed to the individuals, based on their contribution.

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What's next for GroundUp and how to join?

In the next months, we'll be working on designing the cloud platform and getting it up and running. The final goal is to not only reach our milestone in November which is the AgriFoodTech Summit at COP26 but to keep developing the platform post-event. We'll be very happy if you could join us at this revolutionary platform that nurtures collaboration to help solve the biggest challenges we're all facing, described in more detail by Dr. Victoria.

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Register here to get news about GroundUp.

Download GroundUp introduction PDF here.

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