Why I’m DM’ing Every Market Farmer in the US
Farm Generations is seeking farmers for an agricultural cooperative building technology for regional and sustainable agriculture. Join the waitlist now.
Hi — I’m Leanna Mulvihill and I’m on the Farm Generations team. If you’ve gotten an email or Instagram message about GrownBy in the last few months, that was from me!
GrownBy is an app for farmers to sell and manage pre-order market sales and CSAs/subscriptions. Customers can discover farms with distribution locations near them, place orders, choose a pickup location, and pay with their credit card.
I went to grad school at Cornell Tech in New York City in order to learn how to build technology for farmers because I knew that they really needed it. Before Farm Gen, I farmed in Upstate New York State for many years. My farm was called Four Legs Farm and I raised sheep, pigs and cows for meat shares and wholesale accounts. From my experience doing both, I’ll just say that farming is way harder!
My goal is to make sure that GrownBy is super friendly for everyone who needs to use it (farmers and consumers). And I’m asking three key questions :
1. Usability: do you know which button to click?
2. Usefulness: does the button do what you need it to do?
3. Emotional impact: does this piece of technology make your day better?
I don’t want farmers to be thinking about the software. It should just work.
A group of farmers are using GrownBy to manage their 2020 CSAs before we release it to a larger audience. We are so thankful that they took a chance on us. Getting feedback from farmers who are really using the software is critical and we’ve learned a lot.
For example, we found out that one of our farmers wasn’t logging into the software on a regular basis. He was using GrownBy to sign up members initially, but he wasn’t taking advantage of the member management tools.
It all came down to the member sign-in sheets: because his members paid on a weekly basis and our sign-in sheets didn’t include account status and payment information, the member tools weren’t helpful. This farmer generously shared his sign-in sheet with us and we are adding account status to the 1.0 version of GrownBy sign-in sheets. With the update, he doesn’t have to add payment status to his spreadsheets every week!
Farmers are the experts in their own experience and that’s why building GrownBy must be a trusting and strong partnership between farmers and technologists like me. We’re learning together.
