In the wake of increasing border closings and restrictions across Europe related to the COVID-19 crisis, the German agricultural industry faced an acute shortage of harvest workers—impeding farmers’ ability to harvest crops.

In response, tremco illbruck’s IT Manager – EMEA Christian Witschel joined forces with a diverse group of more than 25 team members spanning areas like agriculture, app development, marketing, HR, business development, law and design to create Abernten (“Harvest”), a free platform designed to facilitate the successful placement of agricultural businesses with potential harvest workers. In addition to job placement, the platform offers features such as a robust agricultural network, legal assistance and promotional videos to help simplify the process. In his spare time, Witschel leads development and testing efforts for the platform.

Central to this large-scale effort is raising awareness on both sides of the business exchange, in order to ensure that placements are sustainable and bring added value to all parties involved. To help spread awareness for this resource and crowdsource ideas, a public hackathon called “wirvsvirus” (translated to “Us vs. Virus”) was created.

Several members from Construction Products Group’s (CPG) European IT team participated in the harvest challenge by working together to develop a concept, pitch video and free app in an effort to help connect German farmers with harvest workers.

For more information on this platform and the harvest challenge, visit www.devpost.com/software/ernte-challenge.