Now for another idea that someone may want to run with: a similar concept for local farms that don't ship -- pickup only.
The idea came to me because I live on a small hobby farm and I produce eggs (thinking of getting a few pigs for meat & goats for milk...). Much more than my family needs, but not worth the effort of marketing and selling them, so I just give away the excess; nobody refuses farm-fresh eggs! There's another farm not far from here that sells bison (buffalo) meat, but you must preorder months in advance. His sales are from a big sign out on the road.
What I'm proposing is a site where small farms that want to sell their wares but simply don't have the time to do consumer sales & marketing could list what we have available, customers in the city (we're about 40 minutes outside Minneapolis/St Paul and not far from many suburbs) could prepay online and then pickup what they need when it's ready and the site can take a cut of the proceeds, or better yet, advertise local restaurants, cookbooks, etc to make a profit. Then the "little guys" like me can make a few extra bucks, the consumers get local, fresh meat & produce, and everybody ends up ahead. I'm not very interested in webapps, so I'm not likely to pursue the idea, but I think it's viable.
Now for another idea that someone may want to run with: a similar concept for local farms that don't ship -- pickup only.
The idea came to me because I live on a small hobby farm and I produce eggs (thinking of getting a few pigs for meat & goats for milk...). Much more than my family needs, but not worth the effort of marketing and selling them, so I just give away the excess; nobody refuses farm-fresh eggs! There's another farm not far from here that sells bison (buffalo) meat, but you must preorder months in advance. His sales are from a big sign out on the road.
What I'm proposing is a site where small farms that want to sell their wares but simply don't have the time to do consumer sales & marketing could list what we have available, customers in the city (we're about 40 minutes outside Minneapolis/St Paul and not far from many suburbs) could prepay online and then pickup what they need when it's ready and the site can take a cut of the proceeds, or better yet, advertise local restaurants, cookbooks, etc to make a profit. Then the "little guys" like me can make a few extra bucks, the consumers get local, fresh meat & produce, and everybody ends up ahead. I'm not very interested in webapps, so I'm not likely to pursue the idea, but I think it's viable.