Zakaryae Abechar & Julio Seldas Sánchez
Get in Touch :
https://agropelink.es/
https://www.instagram.com/agropelink/
As Agropelink we believe in a fairer and more sustainable agriculture. It is a startup that connects farmers directly with consumers, eliminating intermediaries and ensuring a fair price for all. Our Agropelink project reduces the gap between field and the table, so that every household has access to fresh and fair produce, and every farmer receives the recognition and remuneration they deserve.
In the initial phase, we have developed a webpage and implemented face to face meetings, field visits and created advertisement campaigns to reach out the people in the community to make them use the webpage. Our idea was to have all the functionality of an easy, intuitive and professional online food shop. The idea derived from the issue of the food security and the increased food prices due to the intermediary’s involvement to the food and agricultural market. We believe that, raw materials are responsibly, sustainably, and ecologically produced, and the aim is to reduce the number of intermediaries between the farm and the table, in order to minimize the carbon footprint both enabling economically reachable food for the households while reducing the carbon footprint on the food production economy. Our objectives were :
– To empower farmers for increasing the economic equitability
– To provide households with cheaper food to contribute to the food security
– To reduce the agricultural food production carbon footprint by providing 0km foods for the households
To tackle with this challenge, we have developed Agropelink. In first three months, we have dealt with the fundamental bases of a company such as logo, visual identity (colours, typography, format and style of image), company identity. Values, slogans and final objectives were established as a lucrative social project. The bank accounts and all the company’s e-mails with automatic response have also been created to ensure the corporate identity inline and the business can act as a place where the people can reach out the farmers rather than the intermediaries to get the food directly from farm to table.
Once all the pages of the website were indexed and checked for interconnectedness. Next, a space was created for farmers, including a registration form and giving them personalised permissions to create and manage (publish and receive orders, read and answer comments) their digital portal with their own profile. In the initial phase, we have worked with the farmers in Almeria and Jaen region due to our group members. The farmers were invited to a meeting were invited to a meeting where it was explained how their portal works and how to access it. In the meantime, an analysis was made of the proposals of the logistics companies that were essential for the correct functioning of the online shop. After all, products were offered on the website and consumers were sought to test its functionality and to buy and sell agricultural products. We managed to sell 20 kg of green and red peppers, the entire stock, using the contracted logistics.
In long run we plan to increase the number of farmers involved in the process and we have already made plans to apply government grants for young entrepreneurs provided by INJUVE in Spain to implement dissemination campaigns to get more farmers and develop the project in a larger scale.
