The challenge
Harvest Ant set out to replace the pen and paper that farm supervisors used to track fruit and vegetable pickers' performance and pay.
Seasonal harvests run on transient, largely unskilled labour that moves between farms week to week. A grower had no metrics to measure that workforce against and no system for coordinating a team spread across open ground — no way to see how effectively the crop was actually being picked. Harvest Ant's answer was a wearable that logs RFID-scanned markers as pickers work, and it had to retrofit to different crops, different sites and different field configurations.
The work
Harvest Ant engaged Tekt Industries in mid 2021 with the platform decision already made: Nordic Semiconductor silicon and licensed Wirepas mesh IP. We did the custom PCB design for both the wearable and the gateway, integrated the Wirepas stack into each, wrote the firmware, built the test regime, optimised the wearable for battery life, and manufactured the electronics.
Mesh rather than a star network is what made the rest work. A star topology puts every worker inside one gateway's radio range; a mesh lets nodes relay for each other, so a single gateway covers far more ground and the network heals around a node that drops out. Nodes can reach more than one gateway, so a site extends by adding gateways rather than by redesigning. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other short-range radio could not cover the distances involved, and LoRa was not a practical answer at the time — early in its adoption cycle, with an antenna-size penalty. The licensed stack also brought diagnostics and device management, and buying proven IP rather than writing a mesh from scratch is part of what made a single design round credible.
The build
The single round was the hard constraint. The client had limited funding and no budget to iterate, so the first design had to produce something field-trialable at the volume a real site needs. We delivered six gateways and fifty wearables at alpha maturity — IP65-sealed, rechargeable, and built on a mass-manufacturable basis. The build ran to four months, to meet the Christmas harvest. Harvest Ant has continued to develop and fund the product itself since.
