Disrupting the Way We Buy Produce

Straight from the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, a new internet-based project to greatly expand the CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] movement into places where it hasn’t been before. It’s a project designed to connect community organizers – volunteers with a group of friends and neighbors who want to get in on farm fresh produce and other fresh foods – to buy in to local suppliers in the usual CSA manner and set up a drop-off point in their area for deliveries and for members to pick up their weekly food items. The company, farmigo, acts as the middleman to negotiate directly with growers, coordinate deliveries and scheduling, and handle the nitty gritty of the business end. It also maintains the web-based platform for people to manage their accounts, order food, and pay the fees. To support this effort, farmigo receives a 2% fee on food sold and collects this from the producers rather than from the customers.

The idea isn’t entirely new, as CSAs in some regions have already set up their local businesses through websites, and even pooled with other suppliers to make for convenient ordering of variety items and coordinate deliveries. Farmigo is pretty much the same type of thing, but on a much larger scale and including big city dwellers. The farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers who offer products through the service still get to set their own terms and commitment periods. When you check into the website you can click on a map to receive a list of suppliers in your area with links and information on already established drop-off sites.

Farmigo also facilitates one-time ala carte purchases of things like eggs, flowers, meats, seafood, baked goods and other things that will be delivered to the drop-off point on your usual days, so the customer isn’t limited to whatever crops are being harvested at any given time on their CSA’s farm, but isn’t corralled into long-term purchase contracts with those other suppliers. This also saves the member/customer the trouble of driving around to several different drop-off points to get their food allotments. Some suppliers will even deliver to your home, depending on where you live and the nature of your orders.

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Filed under Alternatives, Cash Crops, Community, Cooperatives, Economics, Farm Policy, Food Production, Future Planning, Homestead, Trade | Comments (2)

Corporate Food & Human Backlash

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

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Filed under Alternatives, Community, Cooperatives, Economics, Education, Family, Food Production, Food Safety, Garden, Health, Homestead, Hunger, Livestock, Monsanto, Nutritition, Pets, Rural Development, Sustainable Living, Trade | Comment (0)

Barter Networks: Deal or No Deal?

I received a $100 coupon the other day to cover the cost for our home-based business (family entertainment) to join the Hometown Barter Network in our area. Now, we rural homesteaders and small producers in several counties here in the southern Appalachians have been practicing informal bartering since forever, negotiating our trades of goods and services for other goods and services without any formalized valuation system. Meaning that what a person who has something I need will take from me in “fair trade” is something we work out for ourselves the old-fashioned way.

This has worked well on many occasions, and we’ve even been known to make good use of the area’s Freecycle network and even Craigslist freebies when we can. But things come and go on those lists and I still haven’t been able to obtain the metal fence poles I need to properly repair bear damage to the garden fence done two years ago.

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Filed under Activities, Alternatives, Homestead, Independence, Taxes, Trade | Comment (0)