PickTrace is Delivering Workforce and Harvest Management Tools for Sizeable Operations

Whether your farm is 100 acres or 1,000 acres, understanding your operational efficiency and production numbers is vital to staying competitive when you are in a tough area like agriculture. PickTrace streamlines the payroll process and provides you and your managers insight into what your workforce is doing and how your harvest is going. The suite of tools is helping farmers across the globe.

An YCombinator company, PickTrace was founded in 2014 by brothers Austin and Harrison Steed. They started the company by building software solutions for their family's blueberry and avocado farm in Southern California. Helping their family farm showed them the incredible complexities and inefficiencies in agriculture: manual payroll calculation, labor law compliance, and piece-by-piece productivity tracking.They then set out to revolutionize the agriculture industry with a complete farm management solution that genuinely solves growers’ urgent problems. Very quickly, interest in PickTrace’s software solution grew organically among neighboring farms and PickTrace was born.

The company understands the need of the agriculture industry deeply, and is delivering a transformative technology vision. The company’s SaaS product serves the largest berry, citrus, and apple growers in the world and is used by tens of thousands of farmworkers each day.

The company raised a Series A in late 2018 from a long-term oriented investment firm with a terrific track record of building multi-billion dollar software companies. Since then, PickTrace has grown from 10 to 40 employees, including an outstanding product and engineering team focused on best-of-breed modern technologies.

PickTrace has grown significantly from a software tool for the family farm to a high-growth, venture-backed startup. The company went through YCombinator’s prestigious accelerator and raised a Series A round of funding from world-class investors. Its leadership and board are deeply aligned on a philosophy of healthy, stable growth built on a foundation of extremely happy customers. Today, the company serves some of the largest berry, citrus, and apple growers in the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Australia.

Farm Management System of the Future

PickTrace is a fast-growing software company that provides workforce and harvest management solutions for large-scale farms. It is truly building the farm management system of the future.

The company’s powerful technology helps agricultural producers thrive in a time when regulatory, labor market, trade, and environmental pressures are increasingly challenging. The company’s software provides growers with real-time insights so they can improve their operations’ efficiency and compliance. PickTrace’s customer obsession ensures that it solves real pain points, modernizing and transforming the world’s oldest and most fundamental industry – agriculture.

With PickTrace, one can track which employees are doing what, where they work, and how long they work for. During harvest season, PickTrace tracks how much is harvested, of what variety and quality, and at what efficiency. The PickTrace software takes all of this information and provides users clear and actionable insights. The PickTrace tools come as a suite rather than individual modules, which allows users to take advantage of all of the best-in-class features.

PickTrace helps save money in five ways:

• Streamlined data collection
• Expedited payroll calculations
• Informed decision making
• Efficiency tracking
• Effortless legal compliance

Agriculture is incredibly diverse, with each department having different needs and preferences. Even so, each division merits a great user experience with engaging and useful tools. PickTrace is defining a new category in management tools for agricultural entities that addresses these opportunities. The company’s powerful technology is rooted in mobile, built around customers, and designed to be used by every facet of an organization.

For enterprise growers, managing operations that span multiple geographic regions with different crops, people, and procedures proves to be a unique challenge. PickTrace suite of tools was designed with these types of expansive operations in mind. PickTrace delivers a truly powerful set of solutions to enable success across all of entire workforce and operation.

Not just this, PickTrace offers something for marketing firms too. With the role of marketing firms becoming increasingly important in harvest management, PickTrace provides real-time insight into each individual harvesting location, allows customers to login and see live harvest numbers, and gives the production team the ability to monitor quality for each harvest crew.

PickTrace also provides greenhouse weights and production numbers down to the row. Farmers and growers can now understand packstyle efficiency, variety efficiency, and QC information like never before.

Meet the legend

Austin Steed, Founder and Board Member

Highly experienced in the software space, Austin was a Senior Software Development Engineer at Blue Coat Systems before founding PickTrace. Prior to this role, he was a Threat Development Engineer at Solera Networks.

He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the Chapman University.

“PickTrace’s suite of tools captures time entry data in the field, office, and packinghouse, providing real-time visibility across your entire workforce all-year-round.”

“PickTrace is defining a new category in management tools for agricultural entities that addresses these opportunities.”

“The company’s powerful technology helps agricultural producers thrive in a time when regulatory, labor market, trade, and environmental pressures are increasingly challenging.”