Farmers Market dot Com
Farmers Market dot Com. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
Do you do the Farmer’s Market? It seems many more people are discovering that there is good, fresh produce available at the market. Direct from the farm. Sharon Long is the marketing director for a new web resource called farmersmarket.com.
LONG: I’m part of a start-up called FarmersMarket.com and we are just in the very initial stages of trying to build something that’s really big and our ultimate goal is to get people more connected to their food. I’m learning that there are many different sides to this. I tend to come at it from just the consumers side because that’s what I am.
There are a lot of consumers who would like to take advantage of “fresh from the farm” products but just don’t know where to look.
LONG: Our intention is to build something that is the go-to online resource for finding local food whether it’s beef or cheese or fruit or vegetables or it’s a farmers market or whatever it is. We are already winning searches on Google and we don’t even have our website actually built yet. In my mind I’ve read that only 3% of farmers sell directly to consumers and it seems to me that farmers aren’t going to make more money until more of them can sell directly to consumers and consumers have to be willing to spend more money and go to more effort to buy their food.
Long says there are more and more people every month doing online searches for foods.
LONG: Part of where this comes from is if you look at searches online in Google there’s 1.5 million searches a month for the term “farmers markets” plural and if you add in singular that’s another 1.2 million searches and then if you start adding in things like “grass fed beef” or “all-natural beef” or “local food” or - i mean we are in the millions. Granted we have more people than that in this country but those are still some significant numbers that we’re talking about for people online looking and that’s just Google.
At the present the website farmersmarket.com doesn’t have a lot of content other than some interesting blogs but they hope to have more information available very soon.
LONG: We’re doing things in stages so our site as far as a viable site for finding resources is probably at least 3 or 4 months out.
It will be interesting to see as the site does grow how many more people will discover the fresh wholesomeness of buying direct from the farm products.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
