FarmsReach: Connecting Business Buyers With Local and Sustainable Food Producers

Are farmers being left out of the social networking business? Not any more.

If you live in an urban area and buy your fruits and vegetables at a supermarket, you may not consider farming to be a social business. After all, farmers focus on food, not people. But wait. Farmers need people. They need people to eat the food that they grow, and they need people who prefer to source food from their particular farm. Farmers need markets, and markets are people. When we talk about the emerging world of local and sustainable food, we talk a lot about creating and educating those markets for local and sustainable food.

However, sourcing out local food can be a joy, but it can also be no end of trouble, especially for the busy family or the busy grocery store. Why not stay within existing channels for purchasing? Why go more local, more organic, more sustainable? If there's no cost incentive and no public interest, it's much less likely that food buyers will change, even if they're well-motivated by sustainability concerns. This is especially true if sourcing out and researching local food suppliers is a chore.

FarmsReach is what happens when techies go sustainable, organic, and local. Their technology aims to support farmers and businesses to connect with each other, so that local businesses can feature food from local and sustainable farms. They also work with distributors to help discover new markets. By the end of 2010, they hope to offer their services across the United States.

In food sales, production, and delivery, it's the boring bits that matter the most - bits like what produce is available and how long it will take to deliver it to a certain location. Farmers can set up a virtual farm stall that outlines what they sell, where, and how quickly it can move to different places. Buyers can sort and filter based on location and produce available and can order from multiple farmers at a time.

In a place where neighbor knows neighbor and we all buy things from each other, we don't necessarily need social networking to connect. But in places where we're still building neighborly interactions with our local farmers once again, technologies like FarmsReach help buyers, distributors, and farmers find each other, acting as a matchmaker to restore local connections and make ordering and distribution a whole lot easier.

Would you use a service like FarmsReach to find new markets or new sources of local and sustainable food?