Humus Job

Humus is an innovative startup with a social mission, aiming at promoting sustainable, legal and ethic work in agriculture.

In Italy there are more than 1,5 million of agricultural enterprises and over 400 thousands of foreign workers, but the level of illegal work is very high. To contrast illegal exploitation of seasonal workers in agriculture (especially migrants and political refugees), Humus promotes regular employment through the creation of a network of ethical farms. They are a community and share labourforce, tools, facilities and ideas to integrate migrants and local actors, creating regular job and training opportunities.

Humus proposes integrated services, for workers and enterprises:

• Ethical job matching on a digital platform, through the creation of a online database of available agricultural workers in the local area (free service for workers). Launched in March 2020, it counts 2,500 registered workers.
• Job sharing: to reduce the labour cost for companies, the instrument of the net contract is applied by farmers to share facilities, tools and employees, to centralize their purchases and to increase sales with common commercial lines. Since March 2021, already 20 companies from different Italian regions have joined and submitted the national network contract.
• Ethic 100% Brand: this service of tutoring, monitoring and certification is provided to the companies willing to be recognised as ethical farms and that fulfill all the required conditions (regular job, social impact and sustainability).  
• Training, designed together with companies.

The story. In 2018 the association MiCò APS and a group of farmers in the province of Cuneo (Piedmont, North West Italy) started a collaboration aiminig at sustaining regular job placement of migrants in the area. By this cooperation Humus was born. Thanks to a specific initiative supported by a bank foundation (Fondazione CRC) in collaboration with socialFare - the first Italian social innovation center based in Turin -, Humus participated to a social impact acceleration program that led to the creation of an innovative startup with a social goal. In the next steps of the path, they found some private investors and business angels that trusted this idea and supported it.

Since then, the first digital platform for job sharing in agriculture has been created, the network of companies is growing even in other Italian regions and the startup is growing.

Even the network is increasing: at the beginning it was local, in the province of Cuneo, where more than 50 farms were engaged in the first year; now the model is spreading at national level and the goal is to involve companies from all parts of Italy.

Funding. Humus has reached economic sustainability, thanks to incomes deriving from their services (farmers’ memberships to the network), private investors (Altromercato and NaturaSì, two relevant ethic trade chains in Italy), business angels, bank foundation. In 2020 an equity crowdfunding campaign was held and 80,000€ were collected to develop the digital jobsharing platform.

Humus promotes and participate to several projects funded by local, national or EU funds.

Community. Humus is very active with the local inhabitants, farmers and stakeholders, promoting the empowerment of communities in rural areas. They organize meetings and informal events for local people to share information, ideas and experiences about agriculture, regular jobs, ethic trade, etc.