Rooted Farmers, LLC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.12

Description

PROJECT SUMMARYInstructions:The summary is limited to 250 words. The names and affiliated organizations of all Project Directors/Principal Investigators (PD/PI) should be listed inaddition to the title of the project. The summary should be a self-contained specific description of the activity to be undertaken and should focus on:overall project goal(s) and supporting objectives; plans to accomplish project goal(s); and relevance of the project to the goals of the program. Theimportance of a concise informative Project Summary cannot be overemphasized.Title:Redesigning Floriculture Marketplace & Inventory Management Tools for Small ProduceFarms to Increase Accessibility and Reduce Cost.Institution:Rooted Farmers LLCPD:Ihlo Amelia R.Through modest private funding Rooted Farmers (Hanover NH) has developed a dynamiconline platform that provides broad regional market access across wholesale and retailchannels for small- and medium-sized rural farmers. Rooted's online marketplace isdifferentiated by its capacity to seamlessly standardize and aggregate supply across afragmented rural supply chain. The long-term vision is to be able to serve farmers nationallythrough a sales platform that seamlessly accommodates diverse sales channels andcategories while providing efficiency tools to farmers such as automatic harvest listcreation customer and logistics management tools pricing assistance/guidance and apersonal sales analytics dashboard. Rooted currently has meaningful traction with hundredsof on-board flower farmers who have demonstrated a significant reduction in labor hoursan increase in sales and increased access to a network of buyers.The challenges throughout the local/regional floriculture supply chain are paralleled acrossmultiple modes of farming and specialty agriculture in the US and there is a massiveopportunity to replicate Rooted's demonstrated improvements for flower farms in the otherfarming sectors namely produce.This funding opportunity allows Rooted to build out and test a produce-specific platform.The funding will enable: 1) Specification development based on inputs from a sample offarmers nationwide 2) Technology and software development to refine the platform basedon the needs of farmers and 3) Test and validation of produce-specific platform successmeasuring changes in administrative labor hours sales profitability and quality of life forproduce farms as a result of using the Rooted Farmers platform.Key Words:inventory management availability lists sales platform small farm softwareagtechConfidential Proprietary Information