Apr 23, 2012
Small farms, local food getting new technologies

Jane Bush of Charlotte, Mich., is a small farmer with a diverse mix of products for a broad range of local customers. The latest venture for her Apple Schram Organic Orchard is sales of early tomatoes and extended-season greens to hospitals in Jackson, Ann Arbor and Lansing, Mich., as part of the new Four Seasons Cooperative.

Like many smaller, diversified farmers, Bush has had to patch together processing, distribution, marketing and even record-keeping solutions. Most of the more sophisticated services out there, which might handle the complexity of multi-product and multi-market farmers, are designed for much bigger operations.

“Everybody wants to promote smaller farmers, but there hasn’t been a whole lot on the back end for those farmers,” she said.

Social media tools

In a sign of changing times, however, the field of business products and services available to the local food set is now popping with entrepreneurs and innovations. This new business-to-business lineup is also leveraging the power of social networks, mobile phones and other vehicles to leapfrog over conventional food market barriers and establish a new playing field.

Starting on the farm production end of the marketing chain, a leading example is AgSquared, a software package that helps diversified farms plan, manage and monitor everything that happens, from ordering seed to heading out the farm gate. The company launched last December, and was up to 2,000 users at the end of February. AgSquared is offering discounts to early subscribers, off a regular price of $60 per year.

David Baker, owner of Primrose Valley Farm CSA in south-central Wisconsin, calls it a “killer app.” He said he and wife Jamie are happy to have AgSquared in their toolbox, as they scale up from several hundred to 2,000 CSA subscribers.

“Like thousands of farms like ours, our seasonal planning and execution has been held captive by numerous complex spreadsheets that are inefficient at best and not readily capable of accommodating the many twists and turns that are part of our daily farm experience,” Baker said.

The ability to more accurately predict production and quickly adjust forecasts is another benefit drawing users, especially groups of farms planning ahead with larger local buyers.

“I think that the growth in our user numbers – from 150 testers to 2,000 growers in eight weeks – speaks to the need for this service,” said Giulia Stellari, AgSquared co-founder.

Online resources

Moving on to services for marketing products and conducting sales, a leading example is the online marketplace Local Orbit. Many online sites exist for marketing and selling local food. Local Orbit stands out because it allows farms to sell in multiple marketplaces from one account. It also supports farms with a built-in suite of back-end tools for marketing products, tracking customers, updating and monitoring inventory and organizing delivery.

Developed and tested over the last couple of years, Local Orbit is taking off with regional groups trying to streamline and support the flow of local food from many sellers to many buyers. Local Orbit is working with Detroit Eastern Market and the Puget Sound Food Network, and launching new sites in Albuquerque, Baltimore and Colorado.

Christine Quane, wholesale manager at Detroit Eastern Market, is using Local Orbit to step up sales from local growers to area buyers, like Detroit Public Schools.

“Local Orbit provides the information I need to minimize logistics costs in the supply chain,” Quane said.

Supply chain focus

Further down the line of new business services, another set is focused on making the food supply chain more transparent. Leaders range from Top Ten Produce and its mobile bar code branding of food from smaller farms to Real Time Farms and Food Tree, leading resources for online sourcing.

A supporting tool that some of these services, along with many farms and buyers, are using is Sourcemap, which allows users to make their supply chains transparent and connect their supply chain maps through social networking.
“We’re like the YouTube of supply chains,” said Leo Bonanni, CEO of Sourcemap. “Anybody can map their business for free and build maps by linking with others, such as restaurants that are building maps of their local food sources.

“Users can basically ‘friend’ each other and add that information to their supply chain maps.”

Food and farming is Sourcemap’s largest user group so far.

“Out of 2,000 maps, about 1,000 are food-related,” Bonanni said.

In addition to free maps for supply chain social networking, Sourcemap is working with retailers and other companies to map and market their supply chains.

The most compelling thing about this emerging field of local food and small-farm technology support is its potential interconnectivity.

As Cara and Karl Rosaen, founders of Real Time Farms, explained in a Dec. 21 article in the online Food-Tech-Connect magazine: “If we work together … we can move, aggregate and share data seamlessly between farm management systems (like AgSquared), CSA-management systems (like LocalHarvest’s CSAware), traceability software (such as HarvestMark and Top10Produce), food hub distribution software (such as LocalOrb.it), online food distribution systems (like LocalDirt or Farmigo) and consumer-facing educational tools, like Food Tree and RealTimeFarms.”

By Patty Cantrell, Fair Food Network




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