solved for scratch and sniff

You may not know that I came from Dutch dairy farming roots – or that I grew up in an agricultural community. I bottle-fed baby calves and cleaned out their pens – I spent my fair share of time in barn boots and learned to drive on a tiny tractor. While today I live in Seattle proper, my roots run deep and my affection for dairy farmers will never fade.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Art of Milk in Duvall, WA. When I stepped out of my car, I had to choke back a sudden wave of emotion – the smell of a dairy farm was an unexpected throw-back to my childhood memories of grandpa’s farm.

I recently spoke to a room full of 800+ at Women 2.0 in San Francisco about Farmstr. I started the whole talk by telling them I had nostalgia for cow manure. I then told them that Farmstr.com launched, is growing, has over 70 farmers posting offers online and is making a difference in Western Washington – and that we have plans to expand to other cities and across the country. All thanks to a team that knows this food and tech domain ‘down to the cow pie.’

I just resisted posting photos of cow pies. And fortunately for you, computers have not yet solved for scratch and sniff.

Here is what I want you to know: I have written [this blog] Talk of Tomatoes for 8+ years. I am a blogger, urban farmer, trained chef and businesswoman. I have a lot of really cool foodie friends and talented business partners. I know a lot of farmers. And I now run Farmstr.com, an online marketplace where small, organic-quality farmers, fishers and ranchers can sell direct to consumers like you and I. We launched September 2013 in the Pacific Northwest.

Why? I was concerned about food safety, quality, Big Ag, GMO’s, hormones, feed lots – you get the idea. So I angled to source clean food from local farmers through bulk buy groups – and found them to just scratch the surface of a much larger problem. These groups were managed by volunteers, payments were scattered, and ultimately we were buying from too few farmers. There are nearly 40,000 small farmers in Washington state alone – many small, passionate, sustainable farmers with extra food and too few customers. I wanted to help more farmers – and friends wanted to find them. Farmstr helps consumers find and buy direct from countless local farmers, and helps organic-quality farmers sell their food and grow their local customer base.

Farmstr’s platform is a direct sales marketplace where you can access and get to know local, sustainable farmers, fishers, ranchers (including urban farmers). When you buy direct instead of through markets or stores, you tend to pay less as there are fewer costs (think inventory, warehouse, labor, re-packaging, sorting, hard assets). Farmers prefer to sell direct for a number of reasons: it takes the least amount of time so they can focus on farming, they keep higher margins than when they sell through indirect channels, and they get to meet their customers – you! – and develop relationships.