While you are busy in the fields, with your markets, and supplying your CSA, we are working on some bigger projects including upgrading our email system, revamping the ecommerce functionality, and creating a whole new service called "Farming Faces".

Farming Faces serves groups of farmers such as farmers markets, cooperatives, and advocacy organizations enabling these organizations to develop a mini-site that maps their farmer members and keeps end-consumers up-to-date on what is happening on these farms through a news feed.

This is not a national directory of farms like LocalHarvest et al. This is a tool for individual markets and other groups of farmers to market and keep their customers informed.

Some key features:

• It's Free for farmers markets and smaller organizations to set up a Farming Faces site. We plan to charge for larger organizations and advanced features in the future, but the core service will remain free.
• Auto updating news feed aggregates farmer updates from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Small Farm Central sites to keep an up-to-date news area without farmers having to manually update it.
• Beautiful map of farmers within the group using Google Maps so that customers can visualize where their food comes from.
• One farm, one profile. As markets and organizations create farming faces sites and farmers are joined to different groups, there is only one profile for the farmer to manage. An update on one site is copied to all of the other sites the farmer is joined to, which means a minimum amount of management for the farmer and maximum reach when marketing effort is made.
• ..and more!

In essence, we are creating a service that will keep customers highly engaged and informed without extra work for farmers. Also it's just plain fun to see a map of farmers in a particular market to understand foodshed. This is a powerful tool for markets and other farming groups!

Here is a rough screenshot of one of the test sites we are working on:

We've been working on this project for a while and plan to have a beta version out by early August. Let us know if you are a market or other group that wants a first shot at using the service!