Progress 09/01/13 to 08/31/15
Outputs
Target Audience:Specialty crop growers, especially those using organic or other low-impact practices, were the focus of the research and development effort. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We have published a white paper, available on our website, explaining our research methodologies for engaging farmers in the development of software products that address their specific needs. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Impact statement: The difficulty of capturing timely, accurate, and useful harvest records impedes small specialty crop farmers' ability to participate in local and regional supply chains. Distributors and retailers rely on accurate information about upcoming harvest quantity and quality to plan their sourcing and sales, and harvest records also serve as the backbone of an effective food safety and traceability infrastructure. Furthermore, accurate harvest records help small producers understand the effectiveness of their operations and focus their limited resources on those crops and varieties that provide them with the greatest return on investment. However, pen and paper remain the state of the art in harvest tracking. A significant time investment is required to effectively compile, analyze, and communicate the data contained in paper harvest records, and therefore many specialty crop farmers don't keep harvest records at all. As a result, specialty crop supply chains have historically relied on large farms and international suppliers that offer guaranteed production at a certain scale at any time of year, and smaller-scale regional farms have had limited ability to feed into these supply chains. The purpose of this project was to research the supply chain processes, both on-farm and off-farm, that involve harvest records, and to design and develop a working software product that could facilitate these processes and increase the capture, availability, and usage of harvest records. Through a series of research studies with significant farmer involvement we developed a set of specifications for a cloud-based software tool set that can streamline harvest record capture and usage. We then set about building and launching these tools. By mid-project we had already launched a set of harvest management tools that are currently in use by over 450 small-scale farms throughout the United States. A mobile app that streamlines the harvest data capture workflow is in its final stages of field testing, and will launch in January 2016. An application programming interface (API) has been developed to allow third-party software applications to access harvest data from our harvest management system, thereby facilitating connections to software products used by distributors and retailers. Development is additionally underway on a full-featured sales management system for farmers that will streamline farmers' engagement with wholesale buyers of their produce and enable more complete traceability and food safety management. The tools being developed as a result of this project will enable small specialty crop producers to optimize production and sales, pursue new marketing opportunities, and address trace-back concerns. As a result, the impact of our project is to help producers, buyers, and processors increase the efficiency of their businesses, diversify their marketing channels, and enhance their capacity to document food safety issues, thereby increasing the competitiveness of American specialty and organic crop producers and processing businesses and achieving society-level goals of improved food safety and food security. Enumeration of accomplishments: The research objectives described below were studied through three research studies: Study #1 was a Joint Application Design (JAD) session in which 10 representative specialty crop farmers and various members of our research and product development teams spent three days together in a formal data gathering session. A facilitator led the farmers through an exercise in which they systematically mapped out the processes involved in harvest, sales management, delivery, and fulfillment on their farms, resulting in a comprehensive diagrammatic description of all of the steps involved in managing harvest and distribution on a specialty crop farm. At each step in these processes the participants discussed the information required for effective management, and the flow of information between workers on the farm and between the farm and off-farm parties. Finally, farmer participants in the JAD session conducted a series of product feature brainstorms in which they used a paper toolkit to build mockup software user interfaces for software tools that would facilitate their harvest and distribution processes. The end result of the JAD session was an expansive, detailed knowledge base of the farm processes involved in harvest and distribution. This knowledge base is both necessary and sufficient to enable software designers to develop products that facilitate and streamline these processes. Study #2 was a series of 15 farm visits to representative farms by a subset of our research and product development teams. During these farm visits, we interviewed individual farmers in depth about their harvest and distribution processes to test the accuracy of our results from Study #1, and to probe for additional details that may have been overlooked during the JAD session in Study #1. In addition we used these farm visits as an opportunity to test prototype software modules that were built in response to results of Study #1 - during the visits, farmers were asked to use the prototypes and give us their feedback. Study #3 was an in-depth interview with a consultant (Chris Blanchard) specializing in farm organizational processes and in food safety compliance on small specialty crop farms. Mr. Blanchard spent a day with members of our product development team conveying knowledge about the management of food safety practices on small diversified farms. As a deliverable, Mr. Blanchard developed a complete list of all activities and observations that would need to be documented in a comprehensive food safety record keeping system. Our project addressed three goals and a total of 10 objectives. Character limits in this form unfortunately prevent us from even restating all 10 objectives as requested in the prompt, and our full report on our accomplishments for all 10 objectives would not fit even if the character liimt were doubled. All objectives were accomplished during the project. A detailed report has been written, and is available on request from jeff@agsquared.com.
Publications
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