Local Dirt: Making “Buy Local” Work

“It wasn’t because of qual­ity, quan­tity or price; it was just because it was so unbe­liev­ably time con­sum­ing to buy from local pro­duc­ers. The pro­duce buyer would have to have price sheets dropped off or e-mailed in, and then she would hope that she would have them by the time her buy­ing day came around. On that day she would spread out two dozen price sheets in front of her, fig­ure out who had what and how much they had of each prod­uct, then she would break down her wish list and sit there and play phone tag all day long with farm­ers. She would have to ask them if they still had a prod­uct and was it still the same price, because prices change a cou­ple of times a week. Whenever she would get very busy or go on vacation—or if she left and we got a new per­son in that position—the new per­son would just do the eas­i­est thing, which was to go online and order it through the regional dis­tri­b­u­tion center.”

Today, Heather has evolved a remark­able solu­tion. Local Dirt makes it pos­si­ble for buy­ers to log into a sin­gle web­site and access a spe­cial tab that will show what local pro­duce is avail­able from farm­ers in their par­tic­u­lar area. The inven­to­ries are con­stantly updated, so it’s sim­ply a mat­ter of click­ing on the needed items. The order is auto­mat­i­cally generated.

It is far eas­ier for farm­ers too. “A farm can go in and list out their prod­ucts,” Hilleren explained. “Once that is done, all they have to do is update that infor­ma­tion. Whenever they put in fur­ther prod­ucts, these auto­mat­i­cally get added to their pro­file page. They spec­ify which areas, whether that’s a cer­tain zip code or a state or a cer­tain city that they deliver to, and then only the buy­ers in those areas see that price sheet and see those products.”

Both buy­ers and farm­ers love it. “Response has been very, very good,” said Hilleren. “It’s a big jump in tech­nol­ogy. I think the buy­ers wish that all farm­ers would use it because it’s just so con­ve­nient. One of the things that we hear a lot too is about relationships—there was a worry that auto­mated sales would take away from rela­tion­ships. But the buy­ers still say, ‘Well, you know, we see the farm­ers when they drop off the prod­uct, and we’re still going to call them to find out what prod­ucts we can get that aren’t sold to every­body.’ So they con­tinue to want that relationship.”

Consumers can also uti­lize the Local Dirt site to find local pro­duce sources within their areas.

Before Local Dirt, oth­ers had had the same idea, but nobody had fully brought it about. It wasn’t long before Hilleren dis­cov­ered why that was. “You think, ‘Why is nobody doing this?’ and then you try to do it and you real­ize why nobody has done it before,” Hilleren said. “It was just much tougher than any­body had antic­i­pated. We started with the site and we had to make a lot of changes to it. You’d think it’s sim­ply an out-of-the-box order­ing system—but pro­duce is per­ish­able and things hap­pen, weather hap­pens. Sometimes farm­ers have to short orders; they can’t deliver every­thing that they thought they were going to be able to har­vest because they got a hail storm or strong rains came in and wiped out some of the crops. They have to be able to go in and adjust the pur­chase orders. So we set up the online order­ing sys­tem, and we’ve con­stantly been mak­ing adjust­ments that are spe­cific to farm­ers and spe­cific to local food.”

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Hilleren was indeed determined—she put every­thing on the line to bring about Local Dirt. “I decided I was going to do it, and cashed in my retire­ment, pulled together all my sav­ings and every­thing I had,” she related. “I then put it into try­ing to develop the soft­ware. It was very com­plex, and it really didn’t get off the ground until we received fund­ing from the National Science Foundation. Then we had the funds to hire more than one per­son to develop it, and it took a whole team almost a year to develop what you see today. It wasn’t easy.

“We’ve talked to peo­ple who have said, ‘Yeah, I thought about it.’ But I think when they started try­ing to build it, it just got so com­pli­cated and so expen­sive that they couldn’t do it. We have seen online order­ing sites for an indi­vid­ual farm coop­er­a­tive, but they have to develop it them­selves and that gets really expen­sive. This is a site that every­one can share; and because every­one can share it and because it works for any­one any­where, it becomes much less expen­sive than try­ing to develop your own software.”

The inno­va­tion has not stopped at the web­site. Heather and her team have now evolved a free app for iPhone and Android, called Locavore, that will assist any­one, right within their area, to source local food. “The Locavore app, used on your phone wher­ever you are, uti­lizes the device’s GPS to locate farm­ers’ mar­kets and farms within the cou­ple miles from where you’re stand­ing,” Hilleren explained. “It will also tell you what’s in sea­son from where you’re stand­ing, and what prod­ucts are available.”

For local food, this is def­i­nitely the busi­ness model for the future. “Especially as rural areas get more Internet access, it’s less time con­sum­ing and it just makes sense,” Hilleren con­cluded. “It auto­mates so much of the process, and it takes a lot off the hands of the farm­ers. Farmers don’t have to gen­er­ate the invoices and do all that work, and buy­ers don’t have to be really aggres­sive at try­ing to fig­ure out what the farm­ers are offer­ing and what prod­ucts are out there. It’s sim­ply an eas­ier solu­tion all the way around.”

Find out more at www.localdirt.com.

Download the free Locavore app at www.getlocavore.com.