While to many the agricultural industry is one stuck firmly in the past, the hard work of organizations like LABORA have gone a long way to modernizing the sector. Recognized for their efforts in New World Report’s Agriculture and Farming Awards 2021, we thought it time to take a look at this team of AgTech innovators to see just what they’ve done to achieve their justified accolades.
Farm owners have often struggled with finding ways of paying their agricultural workers, with many working unusual hours and the administrative workload continuing to rise. The AgTech platform designed by LABORA makes the process easier for all, simplifying the process significantly.
LABORA offers a better way forward for owners and workers alike, providing online payroll services to farm owners and workers to keep their information up to date, and assisting in the filing of tax returns for those who need to. Temporary farm workers can send and track their remittance money at discounted fees and exchange rates if required. In short, this is a product designed specifically for the way the labor market works in the agricultural industry.
For those who come seasonally into the agricultural industry, it is historically incredibly hard to gain any benefits. One of the core motivations behind the design of LABORA was the improvement of financial conditions for temporary foreign workers. This is why the team’s solution provides access to banking and financial services, which allows them to build not only a credit history, but a way of accessing loans back home. This allows them to do their own agricultural activities in their own countries of origin.
One of the aspects that sets LABORA apart is the way in which it is a B2B service as opposed to B2C. B2C offers individual cash transfers with capped amounts, high fees and low exchange rates, but B2B provides workers with more favourable exchange rates that they otherwise do not have access to. This is only possible before LABORA is providing these services specifically to farm owners, on behalf of their temporary foreign workers. The benefits of using LABORA are clear to anyone who looks.
LABORA fits comfortably into Canada’s agriculture industry because of its innovative mindset. There is already a vibrant AgTech community supported by diverse programs offered by the federal and provincial government to support innovation and technology for the agriculture sector. Many of the obstacles affecting the region as a whole could be overcome through the use of technology and research, and LABORA is perhaps the perfect example of this. It innovates a 50-year-old system to improve the financial conditions and productivity of temporary foreign workers in Canada as well as making life easier for those who had to complete the administrative work involved.
Looking ahead, LABORA intends to continue expanding the range of services it currently provides to clients. When the firm first started operations in 2020, it only offered the B2B money transfer services. 2021 saw the additional of payroll and tax filing services and 2022 will see the provision of financial planning services for optimizing temporary foreign worker’s retirement. The aim for the team is to become a financial services marketplace for underserved and unbanked temporary foreign workers across Canada and in the United States and expect to become a company serving similar workers worldwide.
With such ambition for their company, and such success behind them, there is little wonder that the team has a great future ahead of them. We celebrate their achievements thus far and look forward to their accomplishments yet to come in this vital part of farming industry.
For business inquiries, contact Rene Blanco at LABORA via email at [email protected] or online at www.labora.ca.
