Listening to Land Stewards
Through our partnership with OpenTEAM, Hylo is poised to become the community platform for farmers, ranchers, and producer networks in the regenerative agriculture movement. Almost a year of collaboration went into the launch of Hylo’s farm-specific features to support the needs of land stewards, with the ultimate goal of improving soil health and advancing agriculture’s ability to become a solution to climate change.
We embarked on this partnership with OpenTEAM and Regen Network after identifying a gap in the technology landscape for land stewards — a free, open-source, non-profit tool for producers to help other producers in a peer-to-peer learning network. As a place-based platform, Hylo is particularly suited to support the regenerative movement on the ground across networked communities.
During our Collabathon in Summer and Fall 2021, we embarked on a co-design and development process with land stewards, technologists, and other stakeholders in the OpenTEAM ecosystem to envision the features needed to support producers.
From these sessions, we learned that a collaborative community platform is vital in scaling the regenerative agriculture movement. We learned that producers supporting each other in a distributed, networked manner is essential. Community extends beyond growers — enabling the public to connect with producers and get involved in their local food system is another key need in a platform. Ultimately, we hope that this will foster a deeper connection between humans and their local landscape, bring more awareness to the work of regenerative agriculture, and flow more resources towards these practices.
Hylo’s Land Steward Engagement Program
We heard loud and clear that it’s imperative to include key voices in Hylo’s development process — especially land stewards themselves. To engage this vital part of the community, we organized a Land Steward engagement program where we gathered producers from the regenerative agriculture space in small cohorts to hear about their experiences, desires in a community platform, and feedback on our current platform and future designs.
We recruited our participants from the wider OpenTEAM and Regen Network ecosystems, as well as our own local land steward communities. We met virtually for four weeks in winter 2021 and offered $100/hour per participant in reciprocity for their valuable time and energy.
We selected land stewards from various regions and backgrounds in order to represent a diversity of perspectives. Our cohorts included land stewards, farmers, ranchers, small-holders, commodity croppers, women and non-binary farmers, and BIPOC producers. The distribution of the participants can be seen below.
From this pool of participants, we assembled four cohorts to conduct the feedback sessions: Farmers Interested in Ecosystem Service Payments, Women Ranchers, Black Farmers in California, and Farmers in Northern California.
Participants in the Collabathon let us know that involving land stewards was imperative in order to build trust, and guided us to engage with these folks in ways that were respectful of their time and energy. As such, we designed the four listening sessions to reflect this.
Welcome Session
This was an opportunity for the land stewards in each cohort to get to know each other and the Hylo research team (composed of Clare Politano, Product Lead, Neha Sharma, Partnerships Lead, and Krisha Subramanian, Stakeholder Advocate). We shared the vision of Hylo to support land stewards, and asked the participants how we could best support them in this process.
Listening Session
This session offered space for the land stewards to share their experiences, challenges, and successes, with the lens of how a community platform could address them. We learned about the difficulties faced by land stewards, which informed our feature designs going forward.
Mentorship and Learning
Participants reported that they rely on their communities for mutual support and knowledge sharing in order to thrive. Though we heard over and over again that there are difficulties networking-knowing where and how to connect with other growers. There wasn’t (yet) a space for collaborating, learning from others, and knowledge sharing, with folks relying on word of mouth.
“Knowledge sharing would be a great resource for us. But it’s a challenge because I have to know who to go to, and I don’t know who to ask” — Wenona
“ It’s really hard to find others to learn from” — Christy
“How do I get help from other farmers? There are no meeting spaces to share knowledge.It’s all word of mouth” — Kwayera
Resource Sharing
Another desire we heard from the farmer cohorts is for more resource sharing and borrowing equipment. For smallholders, tool-sharing is essential, as they may not have the capital to make investments in expensive equipment. Borrowing or renting equipment is a way to practice collective action and sharing of resources-as one grower mentioned, ‘returning to (or creating) an agrarian commons.’
“We had to plant cover crops and we had a very tiny window before the storm that was coming in and we didn’t have the appropriate equipment for it. And through word of mouth, we were able to grab someone else’s equipment. But we were lucky that time. It would be great to know who has what to share” — Shaylan “”I wish we had an organized place to go to rent or borrow or whatever equipment.. we don’t really have that.” — Kwayera
We want to acknowledge that equipment sharing does come with liability risks, but we believe that clear agreements and community-supported insurance policies could address this challenge.
Finding Markets/Buyers
Another significant barrier for growers is the supply chain and access to markets to sell their goods. Costs are going up in agriculture, which makes transitioning to new or regenerative practices a challenge. While there may be markets for regeneratively grown products, it’s not obvious how to find these and build the relationships needed for a robust supply chain.
“Making the investment in Regen Ag is a big leap, you need to have the markets in place.” — Anonymous “If someone’s going to make a transition to… regenerative practices, if they haven’t done that before, it’s a big leap…it sounds really hard to finance or be able to take that risk in an industry where the margins are just razor thin.” — Kwayera
Land Access
Securing access to land was mentioned as a huge barrier preventing new farmers from entering the field. The cost of farmland is so high that it is often impossible for folks to get started without a family connection. Equitable access and financing for new, young, women, Indigenous, and historically disadvantaged farmers is essential. While there are grants and programs working towards this, access to this information is sparse.
‘For beginning farmers, how to access land is actually one of the major barriers. [Being able to share] we’ve got this corner of a field if anyone’s looking for a few acres, that would be helpful’
Design Session
In this session, the Hylo team presented our Farm Profile designs and received feedback on what they liked, sections they would reorient or change, and additional content they’d like to see or be able to share.
One key feature in the Farm Profile is Opportunities to Collaborate, where producers can share the ways they are open to connect. We asked our participants about the types of collaborations they are most likely to invite via their profile.
Wrapup Session
In the final session, we shared our updated feature designs based on the previous sessions for a final round of input. We implemented these designs and they are what you see on Farm Profile pages today.
Hylo as a Solution
Detailed Farm Profiles
We heard a clear need for farmers to find others in their network and build relationships in order to discover opportunities for mutual support. Farm Profile pages are the way for producers to share about themselves in detail-their goals, products, land practices, projects, and needs. Sharing all of this makes it easy for collaborators to find each other for mentorship, mutual support, sharing resources, market access, or other needs.
With Opportunities to Collaborate under Farm Profile pages, producers can share the types of collaborations they are open to. For instance, a producer can share that they are open to equipment sharing. Using this feature, other producers can see this need clearly stated on their profile and send a direct message to learn more.
Beyond relationship building amongst producers, Farm Profiles are also a way to develop community between producers and the public (including purchasers), creating pathways for market access.
Finding Other Producers
The Group Explorer is a directory of public groups on Hylo, with a dedicated tab for Farms. Producers and the general public can use this feature to search by keyword and find relevant Farms with whom to connect.
Users can sort the directory of Farms by their Name, Member Count, and by those Nearest to them and can filter the list of Farms by the Farm Type, Operation, and Land Management techniques. By using this, folks can discover nearby farms to visit, find producers growing specific crops, utilizing a specific land management technique or with relevant skills. Overall, we see this as a way for producers to build relationships with others in their region and offer the public a way to connect and participate in their local food system.
Onboarding a Farm or Farm Network on Hylo
We are in the process of beta testing these features with OpenTEAM and producer networks in their ecosystem. We will continue to iterate on the Farm functionality based on continued feedback from their pilot program.
We are excited to share that we are in conversations with other producer networks globally and supporting their process in adopting Hylo as a coordination tool! If you are a producer/producer network and are interested in exploring Hylo for your ecosystem, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Send a message to krisha@terran.io to connect.
Originally published at https://medium.com on September 6, 2022.
