Hello,
I attended the Oregon Small Farms Conference on 2/27 and the session on
marketing your business and products. At that session there were
presentations from three organizations. Gorge Grown Mobile Food Network (a
regional market place) where the network has a van and drives to communities
that don't have markets. Local Food Marketplace -founded in Eugene, OR
(and sounds like what is being discussed here, and third, Food Hub.org, build
by Ecotrust. All are very interesting and have me considering them and
thinking about not doing Saturday markets.
Here are links:
Gorge Grown: http://www.gorgegrown.org/project/mobile-market.cfm
Local Food marketplace: http://www.localfoodmarketplace.com/LFM/Default.aspx
Food Hub: http://www.ecotrust.org/foodhub/
Thought I'd share,
Wendy in Oregon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ryan Platte" <ryan AT bootstrapacres.com>
To:
"Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent:
Monday, March 1, 2010 5:21:42 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re:
[Market-farming] interesting read on CSAs
I'm an experienced software
developer. I've done PHP and several other languages but have the most
experience in Rails. I'm NOT looking for extra volunteer projects (trying to
do LESS software and more farming!) but will need some software a bit like
this for my own farm-credit scheme and would be delighted to share if I wind
up building something.
My best scenario is when someone has a clear idea of something to
implement, so perhaps we've got a fighting chance if we join forces, John and
Kathryn.
Since software has so many aspects that can be worked on, we talk about
"minimal viable products" as the first target delivery. What's the least we
can do for a system like this that would be useful, and when would folks need
it?
Also: does anyone use existing for-pay software? Thanks for the link to
Farmigo. Are there others? Is it any good and how much does it cost? Software
is pretty expensive to build -- it's just like market farming, the customer
price expectations are often WAY lower than the real costs.
There is an open-source Java desktop app that was started with a USDA
grant that could maybe intersect with this effort:
http://code.google.com/p/cropplanning/
Ryan Platte
Bootstrap Acres, Rochester NY
http://bootstrapacres.com/
On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 4:52 PM, John Ferree
<john AT seldomseenfarm.com> wrote:
I think some collaboration would be awesome. I don't know what
you're feelings are, but there might be an opensource/sourceforge type
opportunity? I'm not a programmer, but have a bit of web design
experience. . . with that comes linux, php, database end user
experience. I can outline what I want to do, but not implement
it. I think much of the base is there. There are various carts
out there that do the same thing. We just need a modified
system.
Something that will - allow customization of a base
'bin'
Cutoff customization at a predetermined time each week
Allow
people to take vacations from the CSA
Create users/member
accounts
Create a credit/debit system
Bill people for ordering
extra
Create summary and distribution sheets
But most of all, once
it is built. . . we need some committed CSA members to tell us where the
bugs are and how to improve it.
I'll see where my friend is at, I
think he's just working on an outline of functions. . . and trying to wrap
his head around how it is different from a typical online
store.
John
Yeah, it is from the Abbey's character, and the
lay of our ground Shawnee ; )
On 2/28/2010 12:28 PM,
KAKerby AT aol.com wrote:
Very interesting that you would mention a web-based solution to solve
some of the administrative issues. That's almost verbatim what we'd
come up with here as a potential solution too. I haven't written
such a web page yet, and haven't even wrapped my brain around what all
would need to be done with such a web page, but it's nice to see someone
else thinking along the same lines. John, are you a programmer as
well as grower? That's the background I come from. I'd be game
to collaborate with you on something like this that we could share with
other growers. Not sure if it's quite as complicated as putting a
man on the moon but it might be close. Nevertheless I'd be game
to try.
Kathryn Kerby
Frog Chorus Farm
Snohomish, WA
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