Market customers love to order online because they get first pick and convenience. You'll love their loyalty and the sales that are made before you even load the truck.
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Mid-November Small Farm Central update
Posted November 19th, 2007 by simon.huntley in
Let's get together and talk about the possibilties.
Below is the November Small Farm Central newsletter. If you are seeing this for the second time through the blog, I apologize!
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As we approach the end of 2007, I see farms and farm-related organizations getting excited about the possible applications web technology. It really is a perfect fit: the Internet connects geographically separated organizations and people at a negligible cost. Many small, direct-marketing farms are rural, but market to the urban customer. As our lives, especially urban lives, move further online it is important to find creative solutions to connect farms to eaters.
Perhaps the largest obstacle to this goal is the cost, expertise, and will required to develop complex web systems that solve these problems. I believe that Small Farm Central is one small part of this puzzle. Providing a professional web-presence and e-commerce at low-cost is important because most farmers do not have the time to learn the technology and just want it to work.
There are also many other parts necessary to solve these problems -- listing services like LocalHarvest, coops that use technology to augment their business (such as Penn's Corner in the future or as Lancaster Farm Fresh is doing now), and systems that have not been imagined yet. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a regional sustainable agriculture organization that wants to deeply connect farmers and customers in the region through a comprehensive website. He has some great ideas and I am excited to see that project take shape.
Given creativity, will, and technical skill we can create tools as a community that will keep environmentally sustainable farms economically sound.
Stay in touch!
Otherwise, things are rolling along here at Small Farm Central. I will be at the Acres U.S.A. conference tradeshow in Louisville, KY in December. Come say hi if you will be there! A great way to see the possibilities of the service we provide is to have a phone demo. I can walk through the features of the system with you; it is quite different than most people are used to interacting with a website so it is a worthwhile experience to see a demo.
Articles from a month of blogging at Small Farm Central:
Use web teaser cards to create loyal customers and farm website readers
More patience and "growing" your small farm marketing
Canning is ideology in a jar
Farm ecommerce brings direct, local sales to farm websites
Ruminations on farm business from an aspiring farmer
Connecting with farm customers through website and blog comments
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-Simon Huntley
Lead Developer, Small Farm Central
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com
Support Phone Number: 412-567-3864
In North Carolina...
Posted November 11th, 2007 by simon.huntley in
The Small Farm Central booth.
Thanks everyone who came by the Small Farm Central booth at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association annual conference. I had a great time and feel energized by the excitement of farmers in North and South Carolina. I look forward to working with many of the farmers I met.
If you are coming to this site through literature that I handed out at the conference, let's chat: info@smallfarmcentral.com or 412-567-3864.
Going south and links of interest
Posted November 6th, 2007 by simon.huntley in
I will be at Carolina Farm Stewardship Association's Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Durham, NC as a trade show participant this weekend, so I am madly preparing my conference materials this week. If you are also going, be sure to say hi!
I am busy updating the course in web design and preparing it as a printable document that will be available to conference attendees and later as a freely available PDF document. Otherwise, I am drawing together the necessary conference materials like a display board and setting up a laptop to demo the Small Farm Central service.
The above means you most likely not find your tasty morsels of farm web marketing advice here this week.
In the meantime, why don't you explore a few links in my "sites of interest" folder:
I am busy updating the course in web design and preparing it as a printable document that will be available to conference attendees and later as a freely available PDF document. Otherwise, I am drawing together the necessary conference materials like a display board and setting up a laptop to demo the Small Farm Central service.
The above means you most likely not find your tasty morsels of farm web marketing advice here this week.
In the meantime, why don't you explore a few links in my "sites of interest" folder:
- A reivew of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th century Italian painter who favored painting faces constructed out of vegetables:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/arts/design/10arci.html - Recent conversation with Michael Pollan -
"The interesting thing that I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmer and the best decisions for the environment -- and that there is no contradiction there."
http://grist.org/feature/2007/10/12/pollan/index.html - Great farm blogging with great pictures -- frozen chard is featured in this entry.
http://tinyfarmblog.com/2007/11/03/tis-the-season/
Hi, I'm Simon Huntley, the lead developer here at