Value Chain Coordination
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Collaborative crop planning experiences?
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Collaborative crop planning experiences?
Hi all, one of my main BIPOC/regenerative sourcing pilots into Google and some Sodexo accounts are moving from phase 1 (experimental, voluntary) into phase 2 (committed crop planning). I want to facilitate a crop planning workshop/summit for the chefs, buyers, culinary directors, etc with each set of buyers. Does anyone have any experience with this type of facilitated crop and commitment planning they could share with me? I’d love to hear about your learnings and any tools, spreadsheets, agreements you used.
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4 Replies
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Hi there, Heather. If helpful, I know that a lot of food hubs (Especially those that are farmer-owned/informed) do collaborative crop planning. It might be helpful to see if any of your local food hubs (or nearby food hubs) do collaborative crop planning with the local farmers. As an added bonus, they might present you with a template that you can use that your region’s farmers are already familiar with.
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Once again, Heather, I would point to Fifth Season Co-op in Wisconsin. There are several ways of learning more about it. 1. Talk to the co-op. http://www.fifthseason.coop (2) Ellie Bomstein did a strong paper about their early days when she was a grad student. (3) There is a brief mention in my book, Building Community Food Webs. (4) I am happy to tell you what I know.
Key elements were that the growers formed a cooperative and then invited reps from the buyers (hospitals in this case) to join the board of directors so they would have similar skin in the game. Each fall, the growers would meet together and basically bid on producing a certain amount (acres? pounds?) for the demand that had been identified by the hospital and schools (who could not join the board because as public entities it would be a conflict of interest to be asking for bids from themselves). My favorite part of the negotiation was when the farmers sat down directly with the food service directors at the schools and came up with an original product that the farmers could raise, a local processor could process, and the schools could cook in chafing dishes without much labor. This created a brand new spiced root crop medley that has been used at conferences I have attended as a tasty meal. It is my understanding that over time the growers moved away from planning together, and I have my guesses why that happened, but it is not something I have direct knowledge about. The co-op also purchased group liability insurance and saved a ton of money on that.
Otherwise, you might also want to check with WOLF Cooperative in Indiana. That is an Amish grain milling cooperative (see http://www.crcworks.org/innetworks16.pdf for an overview). I do not know if they plan production together, but it would not surprise me if they do. The co-op board are primarily Amish farmers and they have huge expanding markets in organic dairies and organic chicken bsrns nearby.
One could also check with the various Amish and Mennonite farming communities that have built their own auction barns for selling produce from their own farms. Some of these groups may do some crop planning together.
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I’m working on developing a crop bid system for the producers we work with here at GoFarm. I was generously sent these resources to use as a template. I’d be happy to explain more about how these work if anyone wants to send me a direct message.
Hope it’s helpful!
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Hi Heather,
This is a topic I’m also super interested in as I help coordinate with a group of food hubs in New Hampshire. I’m attaching two resources I have.
The excel is from a Coop I used to work at and to keep the names of farms anonymous as there are prices on the list I just put letters to signify different farms for the first handful of rows to paint the picture. The produce manager would meet with each of their farms in January to make any adjustments necessary which would allow the farmers to accurately plan for seed buying and also show the manager where the gaps were to then coordinate with other farms to fill those gaps for a steady supply throughout the local growing season. This system seemed to work really well for them and I think it could translate into other outlets.
Next is a “Procurement Agreement” (less intimidating words than Forward Contract) I drafted as a template as some of the food hubs I work with are starting to work more with schools and incorporating NH’s Harvest of the Month program. Highly adaptable, I thought this could be a helpful starting point in case you’re trying to solidify some contracts or even put in writing what are hand shake agreements (this document was not overseen by a lawyer and therefore is not legally strong). Of course if you’re dealing with big institutions like Sodexo the contract would look a lot different.
I’m pretty sure the software company called Farm Fare is trying to incorporate this into their platform as well- the ability to record crop planned items and in what quantities, as part of making institutional buying agreements.
Hope any of this helps and I’m curious if anyone else has any success stories/ resources to share. Thank you!
Katelyn
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