Good sourcing starts before the harvest.

Who recruits the workers? Whose land supports the crop? What changes when the harvest arrives? Aseri helps agricultural sourcing teams follow those questions through the growing season, from risk assessment to action with suppliers.

Discuss your sourcing Follow the season

Illustrative agricultural workers carrying harvest baskets along a path through tea fields. Generated with Higgsfield. — Illustrative photography

A different question
at each stage.

Align due diligence with the work taking place. Select a stage to explore the enquiry, evidence and support that could follow.

Who brings people into the fields?

Identify labour providers and recruitment routes. Ask workers what they were promised, what they paid and whether they can leave freely.

Bring the evidence together

Compare recruitment agreements and contracts with confidential worker accounts, including those of migrant and seasonal workers.

Review recruitment practices

Illustrative enquiry framework. Seasons overlap and vary by crop and location; this is not a crop calendar or a completed assessment.

Give the fieldwork a useful starting point.

Start with one crop and the next buying decision. Share the suppliers you know, the growing areas they report and the dates when seasonal workers are expected. Incomplete records help define the enquiry.

Plan the agricultural audit

Locate the gaps between farms and buyers: Bring cooperative member lists or farm records alongside purchase and delivery records. Ask which farms supplied the crop, whether traders mixed deliveries and where origin is still unconfirmed. Analyst-led research can investigate a defined gap and help frame the next supplier request. Geographic intelligence helps prioritise that work; conditions on an individual farm still need enquiry.
Plan around the people present: Compare recruitment dates with the harvest window before scheduling visits. Ask who recruits temporary workers, which languages they use and how interviews can take place privately. Hear from smallholder farmers separately from cooperative leaders, and from seasonal workers whose experience may be missing from permanent staff records.
Agree what the assessment must answer: Scope the farms or facilities to visit and the records to examine. Agree how worker accounts will inform findings and how uncertainty will be recorded. Available audit tools support bespoke risk-led question frameworks, AI audit reviews and auditor assignment and progress monitoring. The brief should name the decision each enquiry supports, with an owner and a date for follow-up.

Start with the crop.
Get closer to its origin.

A commodity name is only a starting point. Growing locations, labour arrangements and trading relationships shape the enquiry.

Illustrative sourcing scenarios. These are questions to investigate, not findings about Colombia or Kenya.

Coffee from Colombia

A buyer could begin by identifying the farms behind a cooperative and the people arranging seasonal labour. Which recruitment terms do workers receive, and can the buyer hear from them directly?

Commodity, Country and Industry Risk Intelligence brings the crop, location and agricultural activity into the same assessment.

Explore the three risk perspectives

Tea from Kenya

A tea buyer could trace the relationship between growers, collection points and processing sites. Where do working arrangements change, and which communities should inform an assessment of land and water use?

Our risk intelligence service can investigate a defined sourcing question and identify gaps for supplier engagement.

Work through a sourcing question

Keep changing geography in view. Continually updated national and sub-national CAHRA intelligence adds conflict-affected and high-risk area context where relevant to your sourcing locations.

Make room for the people behind the crop.

Worker voice and community experience belong in the decisions that follow an assessment.

Build your due diligence approach

Human Rights Risk Assessments (HRRAs) help prioritise concerns. Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIAs) examine how people are affected, informed by engagement with workers, farmers and communities.

Aseri’s consulting team connects that work to policies, purchasing decisions and practical supplier support:

Review labour providers and recruitment practices, including fees, contracts and access to identity documents.
Design accessible grievance channels, confidential investigation and follow-up on remedy with affected people.
Build supplier engagement and training around agreed actions, responsibilities and the next seasonal review.

Carry the findings into the next order.

An assessment becomes useful when sourcing and sustainability teams agree what they will change before the next season.

Review whether order changes, payment terms or delivery deadlines contribute to the pressures identified. Discuss what the supplier can change and what requires action from the buyer. A recruitment concern might call for closer enquiry into fees and labour providers; a pay concern might require checking how piece rates translate into workers’ actual earnings.

Agree the response with affected people wherever possible. Ask whether they can use grievance channels in their own language and without relying on the person implicated in a complaint. Consulting support can help design that process and clarify responsibilities for remedy. Check back with workers or farmers to understand whether the action has addressed their concern.

Connect purchasing and remedy

What needs to happen before your next harvest?

Bring your crops, sourcing locations and seasonal priorities. We’ll help you decide where to begin and who needs to be heard.

Talk agriculture with us Open platform