Greener Together

In an ever-growing space that yearns for more, our product emphasizes what its competitors do not offer, access to volunteer labor to help grow small farms & markets into staples in their communities.

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Team

Grace Edwards, Palveer Lidher, Jonathan Carey, Garrett McKelvey

Problem

Local sustainable food systems are vital to a healthy community, but the small farmer faces many struggles on the path to success. One of their biggest hurdles is the cost of labor to grow their business.

Solution

We are a social network for local producers and potential volunteers. We facilitate and coordinate volunteers to help out on small farms & at market. To have an incentive for volunteers, we have created a reward based system where volunteers can earn points for their hours. With these points earned, volunteers can surpass a certain tier level in which he or she will earn prizes such as a free market basket or even a discount for a market near them. To further the user experience, we added different features to our site such as resources, forums, and market/farmer profiles so that the community is more driven towards agriculture and supporting local farms.

Market Size

According to the USDA 51% of farms have an average size of 81 acres or less. This is our key demographic. In Indiana alone that equates to almost 29,000 farms.

Competition

There are a few competitors that offer some similar features but none that facilitate volunteer opportunities for small agricultural operations like we do.

Business Model

We are customer & mission driven with a premium, subscription-based revenue stream.

Marketing and Sales

Initially marketing will be extremely heavy and focus on newspaper ads, booths are farmers markets, and social media. As the platform builds users we will rely less on traditional marketing and more on P2P referrals.

Progress to Date

We currently have a complete frontend of the MVP. We have made our site user-friendly so that more and more people are entitled to use our site not only for our functionality, but our simplicity as well.

Future Milestones

In the future, we plan to Build a back-end and create a strong marketing push to generate users for our site. We also plan to build a mobile application that will have the same functionality as our website. At the same time, we plan to start building a purchase portal & a CSA subscription platform as well as a tab for classes. We feel that it would be essential to host different classes for the community so that they can learn essential skills that could further them as a volunteer, market host, farmer, etc. Users will be able to register and attend these classes which will also tie into the point based system created in the volunteering section.

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