Supporting Family Farms with Open Source Software
by Glen GillmoreSeptember 2003
LocalHarvest.org is a national directory of small farms, farmers' markets, community supported agriculture (CSA) programs, and other local sources of food. Built with open source software, the site helps create a community of people and their local farmers in an effort to encourage food diversity, freshness, sustainable agriculture practices, and support local economies rather than giant agribusiness. I recently met with the creator of LocalHarvest, Guillermo Payet, to learn more.
Glen Gillmore: How did LocalHarvest originate and what are you trying to accomplish?
Guillermo Payet: Back in the good old days of 1999, it started as a project of Ocean Group, my Web development firm. At that time, we needed a project to test new technologies, train our new engineering hires, and donate back to the community in the form of a useful service.
Being a fan of good food and an advocate of sustainability, the idea of building a search engine for people to find local food and help family farms market their products seemed like something I wanted to pursue. After four years of work, LocalHarvest now helps thousands of people every day find high quality farm products from their local farmers. We're also the number one web site for the fast-growing Buy Local movement.
Gillmore: Why is it important for people to buy local food products?
Payet: We lose a lot when we homogenize our food systems and turn them over to industrial agriculture and large-scale food chains. We reduce the variety in our diets, we weaken the cultural and economic health of our communities, we pollute our land, air and water with poisons, and we support agriculture in faraway places with terrible environmental and labor standards. There's an easy way to contribute towards preventing these things. As a result of buying locally grown products directly from family farms, we get to eat better-quality food while supporting our local economies, and encouraging sustainable farming practices.
Gillmore: What specific things have you done to try and develop a community for bringing people and farmers together?
Guillermo Payet
Payet: The LocalHarvest web site lists about 6,000 local sources of food from all over the country. A lot of work has gone into recruiting all of these members into our site. Once we achieved a "critical mass" of farms, the search engine became truly effective and our traffic started to grow fast. Then we added features designed to keep people coming back for more information and to encourage them to build closer relationship with their local farmers. For example, we have a "farm events" calendar, which our member farms maintain, and which sends weekly emails to almost 4,000 subscribers informing them of any events happening in their areas. We also have an album of farm photos, maintained by our members, and lists of products offered by each farm, with links to information about the product and recipes.
Gillmore: What tools and technologies are behind the site?
Payet: Ocean Group is an open source and Java shop. For LocalHarvest we used the same architecture that we used in all of our projects, consisting of JSP and Java Beans running over the Tomcat application server, over Linux. We use OpenMap for map generation, MySQL for the database, and OpenLDAP for directories. There are lots of other open source tools, with smaller roles, used throughout the project.
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Gillmore: Are there parallels between the open source community and people who buy organic, locally grown food?
Payet: I think so. Both open source proponents and "buy local" people are advocates of diversity and the absence of centralized control. There is the idea in both realms of the underdog fighting the status quo to build a better world that empowers individuals and offers wider choice. It's been great for me to use tools built by a virtual community of hackers to build a system that strengthens real geographical communities, and that in some ways embodies such a similar system of ethics.
Gillmore: The central part of the site seems to be the GIS driven, dynamic map. Tell me how that works.
Payet: We built a GIS enabled search engine by using some spherical trigonometry functions (Great Circle) in our SQL queries, and merging these into a zoomable/pannable map built with OpenMap. The result is a search engine that allows searching for a particular product, and then zooming into the map to see who grows that product in any specific area of the country. OpenMap loads the map data into memory at the time of Servlet load, and then renders a custom map for every query, according to coordinate, scale, and other parameters passed along in the map's URL.
Gillmore: Regarding the new e-commerce part of the site, doesn't mail order conflict with the idea of buying locally?
Payet: That has certainly been a concern of mine. A web site that promotes the local farmers' market should not be selling tomatoes from across the country. LocalHarvest's goals are to generate business for family farms, to promote buying local, and to promote sustainable agriculture, in that order. We focus our stores on value-added products that our members are likely to offer in quantities larger than what their local markets can absorb. We do not list produce or fresh fruits, since these are better bought at the local farmers' market or directly from your local farmer. We do make some exceptions for very regional items, like cranberries, for example. We also encourage buyers to choose the items that are closest to them by sorting our catalog by proximity to the buyer, and by displaying the distance to the product in question.
Gillmore: Which O'Reilly books have helped you the most over the years?
Payet: That's a tough question, since so many of my O'Reilly books are used constantly for reference. Some of my favorites are Unix Power Tools, the recent Linux Server Hacks, and of course, the Java series.
Guillermo Payet (gpayet@localharvest.org) is the founder of Ocean Group in Santa Cruz, California. Ocean Group is dedicated to building Internet infrastructure for nonprofits and activists using open source technologies. Guillermo grew up on the Pacific coast of South America, in Lima, Peru. As a child, he spent his time on small farms in the Andes and in the small fishing villages of the Peruvian coast. A systems engineer since 1984, Guillermo was quick to recognize the great potential of the Internet as a tool for change when he first worked with it in 1988.
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