Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Sustainable Food 2.0

A panel of people engaged in sustainable food projects online.

Sustainable Food is complex system that requires intervention in multiple places. Many projects online addressing the sustainable food space.

Projects Overview:

FarmsReach 

Connecting local farmers and wholesalers: Technology for fixing our dysfunctional food supply. [farmsreach.com]

Intensive farming is inefficient [!!], uses petroleum based chemistry and contributes to glabal warming. Smaller farmers don't make as much money. This application allows smaller farmers to connect with local food merchants and restaurants. It is like shopping with a shopping cart for the restaurant or market. Their needs are automatically distributed to the farmers, including specifications for delivery/pickup.

Food 2.0: No Farms No Food campaign.

American Farmland Trust campaign used since 1980 tying together land protection and local food. The complex link between farms, farmers and food.  "Farmers markets" search volume increases dramatically each year in the May-July timeframe.

Goals of the campaign are to reach new audiences, keep awareness high and test new messages to encourage people to seek out and use local farmer's markets. Used bumper stickers to leverage farmers spreading the word and uniting with one another.

Distributed 30,000 stickers and converted 4% of subscribers to the website into donors. The sticker comes with a pledge.

Google underperformed Yahoo in the search campaign. Farmer's market traffic is higher on Yahoo. Farm Policy conversations are more prevalent in Google Search. The demographic differences are reflected in who is using Yahoo for search. Reaching the farmer's market audience through SEM should incorporate Yahoo.

Get a free No Farms No Food sticker at NoFarmsNoFood.org.

CimateCrossroads.org

A community with an agenda...a project of the Sierra Club. Using food as a gateway drug to get people to take action on climate change. A national audience of 30-55 year old environmentally conscious people. About 1% of users are expected to be core contributers of content.

Goals are about communicating everyday actions individuals can take...through the user generated content and Sierra Club content. There is no real Sierra Club branding on the site.

The site organizes things around actions (like taking the Plastics Pledge) using applications that can be generated by the user community.

Another organizating principle is recipes, where the conversation around food also stimulates ways to incorporate climate sensitive advice (like domestically grown olive oil versus imported).

Other online resources:
  • Foodzie: eBay for local food. 
  • OxFam
  • Monterrey Bay Aquarium
  • Good Guide: A certification process and buyer's guide for food providers along with APIs for use on other sites.
  • Climate Crossroads:
  • WattzOn: Measuring your personal wattage (especially as food contributes to it)
  • EatWellGuide: Blogging resources.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for coming! Links and more info available here: www.savefood.wikispaces.com

    ReplyDelete