1. Farms At Your Fingertips
Rob Barreca
Director

2. Farm Link Hawai‘i Founded January 2015 Farmer Owned
Farmer (mostly) Operated
FTE Staff: 2
Online marketplace
Built on Ruby on Rails
Will be open sourced in 2018
Island-wide Organic Growers Network
Regional Hubs
Waianae, Waialua, Waimanalo
Delivery and Accounts Management
Online Marketplace
2017: ~50 buyers, 38 in Q3
Organic Growers Network across Oahu
2017: ~50 farms, 37 in Q3
Regional Hubs
Got a town with farmers that starts with Wai? Let us know!
Delivery and Accounts Management
Market Development
Farmer Owned, Farmer (mostly) Operated
With the exception of myself, everyone is involved in commercial production. I’m too busy talking about agriculture..

3. A Farm Service Company Technology Online Marketplace
Inventory Management
Traceability
Streamlined Payments
Harvest to Order
Infrastructure
Convenient cold storage
Refrigerated trucking and logistics
Business Development
Sales Management
Invoicing & Payments
Buyer outreach to help increase farm viability and reduce food waste
Control in producers’ hands
Increase sales for producers by improving access to market

4. Buyer Benefits Fresh & Local Staples & Specialty Fast & Easy
Source from dozens of farms
Online orders & payment
Food With A Story
Know Your Farmer
Directed outreach to meet product demands
Demo the site
Transparency / Know Your Farmer: the who, what, where, and how of each grower
Increase local purchasing by making local sourcing easier for buyers
Buy from multiple farms with one click
Receive one shipment vs. 20
Streamlined payments
Locate hard-to-find products from hard-to-deal-with farms

5. Connecting Demand and Supply
Demand > supply
Limited demand data
Produce Information Exchange
Helping producers get to scale
Just-in-time -> contracts
Smoothing supply wrinkles
Smoothing out the wrinkles between supply and demand
Local demand often outsizes supply
85% now, but also 75 years ago
Limited demand data
Converting one-time transactions into standing orders

6. Supporting Local Farms, Families and Communities
Local Always.
Farmer Forward
Beginning & Experienced
~½ Beginning farmers
~⅓ GoFarm Hawai‘i alumni
Developing Regional Networks & Infrastructure
Cold Chain
Hub Partnerships
Consumption into Control
Focused on helping Oahu growers first
Local Always.
We work exclusively with local farmers
46% new farmers
32% GoFarmers

7. Sustaining the ‘Aina Organic Always
Supporting agroecological production
In 50+ farmscapes across the island
Diversified & Small Scale
Organic Always.
All our producers follow organic practices. Some are certified organic. Others not.
Group GAP? Group Organic Certification

8. Economic Opportunity Farmers First
Use economic opportunities to support farmers first
$129,397 directly to farmers in 2017
~$3,400 sales / week
Mathletes will be quick to note we operate on a thin margin
Growth
2017 surpassed the combined sales of 2015 and 2016.
Based on previous growth, we are slated to clear over ¼ million in 2018.

9. Connecting Demand and Supply
Smoothing out the wrinkles between supply and demand
Local demand often outsizes supply
85% now, but also 75 years ago

10. How do we use data to answer...
What local products do buyers know they want?
What do buyers want that they don’t even know?!
What are farmers growing now and selling?
How much is being grown that they cannot sell?
What could farmers be growing if only the knew there was demand?
What should a beginning/expanding farmer not grow?
What questions do you think are important?
Want to capture this data, but even more importantly we want to be able to action on this data! How can we have data trigger change by feeding back into daily decision making for local farmers, market managers, and buyers.
Smoothing out the wrinkles between supply and demand
Local demand often outsizes supply
85% now, but also 75 years ago

11. Meaningful action from answers
A grocery buyer purchases all available bok choy inventory, what’s her demand ceiling so we can grow more?
A chef purchases Fairy Tale eggplant every week, can we parlay into an automatically recurring order providing stability for farmer?
Buyers can pre-order (at a discount?) crops still in the ground.
A GoFarm graduate/beginning farmer understands what crops to focus on (and what not to grow), at what volume, and what prices they might expect.
Buyers source more and new local produce they didn’t even know could be grown here (economically).
Want to capture this data, but even more importantly we want to be able to action on this data! How can we have data trigger change by feeding back into daily decision making for local farmers, market managers, and buyers.
Smoothing out the wrinkles between supply and demand
Local demand often outsizes supply
85% now, but also 75 years ago

12. A path forward
Local Orbit, the software that powers Farm Link Hawai‘i, will be released as open source (MIT license) later in 2018.
Local Orbit is used by over 50 food hubs and thousands of farmers and buyers, and transacts over $10 million dollars in local food sales annually.
We aim to cultivate an open source community of innovators who want to push local food forward.
Potential for economic development via contributed paid add-ons similar to Wordpress, Shopify, etc.
Can significantly impact the local food market in Hawai‘i as we expand to all islands.
Want to capture this data, but even more importantly we want to be able to action on this data! How can we have data trigger change by feeding back into daily decision making for local farmers, market managers, and buyers.
Smoothing out the wrinkles between supply and demand
Local demand often outsizes supply
85% now, but also 75 years ago

13. Mahalos

14. Rob Barreca Director (808) 224-1905 rob@farmlinkhawaii.com