Bringing Good Food to Pennsylvania's Eaters One Map at a Time

Small Farm Central's latest development project was quietly released a few weeks ago (besides the Small Farm Central project we also provide professional web consulting and development services to agriculture-related organizations).

BuyLocalPA.org's goal is familiar: connect eaters with local sources of food. The technology takes the next step in modeling a local food system by combining the latest web mapping technology from Google Maps with advanced profile creation, local food event management, comment functionality, and more.

The site is open for free to any local food business in Pennsylvania, so if you are in the state head on over to the site and sign up.

Some sample searches:

Map the Pittsburgh area: http://buylocalpa.org/map/15224

Map Philadelphia: http://buylocalpa.org/map/19146

Who is selling lettuce currently near Pittsburgh: http://buylocalpa.org/map/search?text=lettuce&zoomlevel=9&zip=15224

Farmers Markets in Eastern Pennsylvania: http://buylocalpa.org/map?zip=19149&checkedcats=15

Events Near Pittsburgh (local food week is coming on September 21st): http://buylocalpa.org/map?lat=40.466800689697&lng=-79.993499755859&zoomlevel=10&checkedcats=event

A Few of the Innovative Features

Current Products: One of the big questions consumers have is: what is in season now? If you are looking for local corn in February, the site should reflect the fact that farms do not have corn available at that time. Farmers on BuyLocalPA.org create a list of all their products at the beginning of the season with general start of end dates of availability (using a fancy "slider" control) and then the software that runs the site takes a look at that list each week and automatically adds and removes products that should be in or out of season. Of course there is the ability to override the system just in case a strawberry crop fails.

Multiple Locations: Each profile can create multiple mapped locations. For example, if your CSA is located 50 miles outside of the city, but you do 15 drop points within the city, isn't it more important for potential members to know where the drop-off points are rather than the actual farm location?

Trading Partners: Farms and consumers can map out their food-shed by creating links on their profiles to sellers, buyers, farmers markets, and other profiles that are on the site. In this way, a consumer that was interested in Turner Farms milk can find out that the milk is sold at Whole Foods, Giant Eagle, and the East Liberty Farmers Market.

Stay Local: Searching and viewing is done at the zip-code level because eaters in Central Pennsylvania are not interested in the local food offerings of Northeast PA.

And many more innovations from event mapping to making local food connections between users (like, how can I find someone to share a side of beef with me this fall?).

The project will be supported by special features that are available only to paid consumer members and paid local food providers. This is an exciting model and I look forward to continued involvement in making it a success.

This is all part of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture's (PASA) outreach to local food consumers. I am proud of this project and I hope Pennsylvanians will find something good to eat!

Spammers Hit a Literary Wall

Ever wonder how we control spam on Small Farm Central sites? We use a system that you have seen many times throughout the web called CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart).

This is a series of distorted letters and words that is difficult (or hopefully impossible) for a computer program to decipher, but is easy for the human brain to translate.

It's not really important for you to understand the specifics except that a CAPTCHA makes sure that a human is at the other end on comment submissions, emails from the website, mailing list submissions, and anywhere else that we take input from the user.

We use a really interesting implementation of the CAPTCHA called reCAPTCHA (starting in fall 2007) from Carnegie Mellon University which is coincidentally just a few miles down the road in the same city that Small Farm Central is based.

Each CAPTCHA word on Small Farm Central sites is scanned in by a project that is seeking to digitize the literary public domain. There are always certain words that the computer cannot understand as they attempt to encode these books, so the reCAPTCHA project takes the collective brain power that was heretofore wasted on CAPTCHAs and puts it to the task of deciphering these words so that these books can be searched and read digitally in the future.

I won't hope to match the reporting skills of the Wall Street Journal, so that covers the basics: read this Wall Street Journal article for all the interesting details! Thanks, Patrick for the link.

If you want to test a reCAPTCHA for yourself, you are welcome to try leaving a comment on this very entry.

It's Time to Think About Late Fall Sales

Do sales stop "cold" after the farmers market closes or you shut the doors on your farm stand in the Fall?

In October and November, there is usually hardy produce in the garden, meat in the freezer, and the chickens are still producing their eggs. Customers are still hungry for local food and it is finally cool enough in the kitchen to do some real cooking.

If you have been collecting email addresses all summer for your mailing list, your customers are just an email away. Use the Small Farm Central mailing list manager or send one on your own to let your customers know about your availability this fall.

Of course the ecommerce extension makes this process easy and efficient. Just set up your inventory, send a note out to your customers to tell them that the online store is open for business, watch the orders come in with email notifications, and then print a report when you are ready to pick and pack.

As you just sweat through another muggy summer day, it seems a bit premature to start thinking about the cool days of fall. The idea of heavy coat is so foreign at this time of year -- it is hard to remember being cold. But if you want to sell in that shoulder season, it is time to start collecting email addresses, planting a bit extra to sell during those after market months, and start informing your customers that this service will be available during the cooler months.

On a more summery note, I like the colorful ecommerce pages Green Gardens Community Farm in Battle Creek, MI created with Small Farm Central:

Or take a look at the "item detail" page for Kale that shows the customer exactly how this crop grows.

Getting a Custom Website Designed for your Farm?

An option we haven't discussed much here at the Small Farm Central blog is having a website custom designed from the ground-up by a designer or developer. This is not the approach we take with the Small Farm Central service (though we can get a custom design done for you, if you like) simply due to the cost incurred in custom development. For some farms, the cost of this work is justifiable.

How much does it cost?

For a good designer or developer, expect to pay at least $40/hour; the most expensive designers can cost much more more than $100/hour. At an average rate of $50/hour, you should not expect to spend under $1,500 on a custom designed website. This of course depends on the features: if you want ecommerce, a mailing list manager, or a blog expect to pay more.

These are initial development costs, so you should expect to pay more for hosting, domain registration, and on-going maintenance of your site.

Questions to ask your designer

It is perhaps a bit obvious, but ask the designer to provide samples of previous work. One thing to account for is that a farm website is going to look vastly different than your average social networking or hard rock band website. You need to make sure the designer has a feel for the agrarian or you will be really disapointed in the product and will likely spend a lot of money getting it right.

I heard the story of organization that supports urban agriculture in a particular region getting a website redesign. They hired a respectable local designer that has done a lot of good work in the past. When the first draft came back to the organization, the header of the website had a large corn field as the main graphic. Of course, it is excusable for an average person to think that corn is an urban crop, it was not excusable for a designer doing work with urban agriculture organization. After a few more rounds of redesigns, it became clear that the relationship was not going to work and another design firm had to be found. This mistake lead to a few thousand dollars wasted on these capable designers who couldn't work with an agricultural look.

Make sure the designer has experience creating some of the advanced features you want on your website like websites and blogs. While these elements should not be a problem for a capable developer, it is hard to know what you will get if you have your designer "learn on the job."

Friends? Students?

I hear from a lot of farmers who had a friend, customer, or student develop their website for them. I imagine that many of these arrangements work and that I only hear from people who are dissatisfied with their website. Many new Small Farm Central members get tired of contacting their designer to make changes or having someone who isn't a complete professional in the position.

Ask for a Content Management System

A competent web designer does not want to be contacted each time you want to update your product list or add a photo to your website ... they have better things to do. A content management system allows you to login and make basic changes to your website like wording, prices, or photos. This will likely cost you extra in the short run because it is more work for the person you are hiring to design your website. In the long run, it can save you a lot of money. I hear about farms really having to measure how often they can update their website because their designer will charge a full hour rate for any changes made -- think $50 to change a misspelling or add a paragraph.

You will still have to contact your designer for more drastic changes, but most of your pages and your photo gallery should be readily accessible 24 hours a day at no cost to you.

Next week: How to Find Great Designer

Next week, I'd like to talk more about how to find the right designer. I'd also like to post links to some designers that specialize in agricultural web design. I know of some, but I am sure there are many more that I haven't heard of. Do you know any? Please post in comments if you do.