01/08/07 Farming the Web

Farming the Web. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Farming has always been about growing great products and selling those products to the masses. There are still a few examples of local produce stands where anyone can drive up and get the freshest fruits and vegetables available. But suppose you are looking for something a bit different and your local grocer can't help you either. Now the World Wide Web has come to the rescue with Local Harvest.org. Guillermo Payet created the idea several years ago, quite unintentionally. PAYET: I had a little software company. We had a period where we were working on big projects and sometimes we would have a break between projects so instead of like having everybody just twiddling their thumbs in the business, I thought it would be nice to have something to keep people busy and at the same time donate back to the community (with) the technology we were developing for commercial clients. They hit on the idea of a web site that would support family farms. PAYET: First - family farms, second - buy local, and third - organic agriculture. It's farmers that sell directly to consumers. Mostly organic, but not entirely organic. Payet explains how the site works. PAYET: A farmer that wants to sell their stuff directly to consumers goes to the website and creates a listing describing the products, adding a photo and entering contact information, anything like that and then once we approve that it goes into our search engine. Products are separated into categories to make searches easy. PAYET: Any consumer that is looking for say a local farmers market or a grocery store that sells locally grown produce or they want to buy directly from a local farm, they can go to the site and enter the zip code; enter what it is they're looking for and then we'll give them a list of all the farms that are close to them with whatever they're looking for. LocalHarvest also products available for purchase. PAYET: We have about 4000 different products right now from about 300 farms around the country where you can search for cranberries or meats, jams, fruits, dates. There all kinds of different things you can order from family farms. Payet calls this project self-sustaining activism. What are the most popular products? PAYET: It's very seasonal. Thanksgiving, you know turkeys. Everybody's searching for turkeys. Then in October, pumpkins, local pumpkin patches or buying locally grown pumpkins. Right now there's a lot of people searching for fibers; wool, alpaca. Again the web site is www.localharvest.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.