This past spring, my wife and I bought a share in a community-supported farm. It's been a lot of fun, making my way to the supermarket every week, picking out the choicest specimens of lettuce, tomatoes and peppers, and flipping through recipe books trying to figure out what to do with it all. We're discovering all sorts of new dishes, eating better, and supporting an environmentally friendly way of farming.
For all the fun of participating in a community supported farm, though, I can't help but wonder whether the experience could be enhanced by an online community. I'm not sure why exactly, but our farm has a very out-of-date website. The farm does a lot to cultivate its member community: it holds special events on-site, offers cooking demonstrations in the Boston area, and distributes a weekly newsletter, which is heartfelt and thoroughly interesting. But almost none of these efforts make it onto its website, which seems like a real shame to me.
So what are the kinds of things that our farm, and maybe other community-supported farms, could do online? Here are a few thoughts:
- Process payments online - this is a no-brainer but, unfortunately, all payments to the farm are processed by old-fashioned checks. It'd be nice to be able to sign up for a share, or buy bulk produce with a few simple clicks.
- Allow members to exchange recipes with one another. This is particularly important because some weeks, the vegetables being distributed are very unusual; a couple of times, I take them out of the fridge and don't even know what they are. A few helpful suggestions about how to use the vegetables would go a long way, and I bet some of my fellow members have excellent ideas.
- Along similar lines, allow members to swap vegetables with one another. I can't get enough tomatoes and peppers, but I'm sure some of my fellow members would prefer potatoes or corn instead; since most members probably live within a few miles of the farm's distribution center, this would probably be a very popular feature.
- Distribute the weekly updates on a blog. Especially in the case of our farm, where the updates they give us are very interesting and perfectly describe the travails of working on a farm, I think blogging with updates on the farm would be extremely interesting. More generally, distribute galleries of photos and videos of farm life; galleries would help strengthen the ties between farmers and farm members.
- Offer email list subscriptions and RSS feeds for upcoming events, both on the farm and elsewhere.
- Allow members to organize their own events, like pot-lucks, and to organize car-pools to the farm.
These are just a few loose ideas, but I bet some of these features would go far in strengthening the farm's member community. Some of these features might help the farm earn a bit more cash, through increased bulk purchase orders, for example. And it would certainly make membership in the farm - an already fascinating experience - even more enjoyable.
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