Seso Wants To Help Solve A $3 1 Billion Farm Labor Crisis Through
Crop doesn’t wait. And American agriculture has been facing a labor crisis for decades, resulting in the wastage of $3.1 billion worth of food. Farm labor employment has fallen by 75% in the past seven decades, according to the USDA. Filling in a crucial gap, migrant workers account for a majority of the agricultural labor force. In recent years fewer workers are migrating to the U. S. and those who do come have to go through the onerous H-2A program, a process peppered with inefficiencies. Cofounders Michael Guirguis and Jordan Taylor have set out to fix this problem with Seso, a startup that connects farmers who need workers and migrant workers who need employment.“Farmers want to farm. They're not good at paperwork,” says Guirguis, whose startup is digitizing agricultural recruitment and payroll processes, most of which to date is done with pen and paper. Seso provides farmers with visa automation for migrant laborers, government regulatory compliance, an employee database and management tools to ease an administrative documentation process riddled with complications. The startup issued 5,500 agricultural workers with H-2A visas in 2021. Almost a year after the labor marketplace launched, Seso announced Thursday it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures with Founders Fund, NFX, and K5 Ventures participating. Founded in 2019, the company has 35 employees and 77 customers including some of the largest farms in the country. Farmers who use the startup’s technology to recruit and manage migrant workers span a broad spectrum including a South African ostrich farmer, sheepherders in Utah, and a bee farmer in North Dakota. Farmers have traditionally relied on middlemen to bring in H-2A workers. Mistakes in the tedious visa application process have resulted in late arrivals of workers and ultimately billions of dollars worth of wasted crops. “The program requires you to work with four or five different government agencies,” Gurguis says. “It is so complicated, it was never meant to succeed. It is a broken system.”B. T. Loftus Ranches, one of the longest-running hop farms in Yakima Valley, uses Seso’s technology to communicate with returning employees, many of whom live in rural areas without cell service. Seso, which also has employees in Mexico, helps arrange transportation for migrant workers to reach the consulate safely and as a result, it has reduced 70% of the work that fell on the HR department.“The logistics of having to locate the workers was definitely a big hurdle that we had to overcome every year,” says Alex Munoz, director of human resources at B. T. Loftus. “By having a recruiter that reaches out to the workers via different platforms, it has definitely made our contract process run smoother.”Before building a workforce management portal for the agricultural industry, the 32-year-old CEO worked at the White House on the National Economic Council, developing employment and housing policies.
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Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishr...
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