Too much kale in that weekly farm produce delivery?
With tech tool, humble CSAs becoming more market-driven
The rations appeared every week under Dawn Keezer’s deck, beneath a tarp strung over folding chairs: cardboard boxes of yellow peppers, salad greens, kale, baby broccoli, tomatoes, eggs, and sourdough bread still warm from the oven.
Occasionally, something showed up she had never seen before, like ground cherries — a small fruit wrapped in a papery husk with a texture like a tomato but tart like a cherry.
“It’s like you pulled them out of your backyard garden,” she said.
She wasn’t too far off. For 22 weeks last year, the products came freshly harvested from Rivendale Farms in Washington County through a community supported agriculture, or CSA, program.
CSA programs, dating back 30 years, allow customers to buy a share of a farm’s harvest — usually a wide assortment of goods that arrives through the warm months and is dictated by what the farm has at any given time. For customers, that unpredictability can mean new ingredients for fun, creative meals — or a shelf of rotting produce.
But, in her program, Ms. Keezer could also log onto a software platform and rank the products, using a sliding scale of five emoji reactions ranging from “I love it” to “not for me.” A few hot peppers and onions, she said, go a long way.
“The ability to pick and choose what’s in your box is key,” Ms. Keezer said. “You didn’t get anything in your box you didn’t want to use.”
The software platform was launched three years ago by Harvie, a North Shore-based company that is part of a wave of Pittsburgh-area farm technology firms seeking ways to improve business for farmers and to feed into a growing demand for local food.
CSAs, also called farm-share programs, originated with a group of New England farms in the mid1980s.
The setup was a bit idealistic, with some programs expecting customers to put in work hours on the farm, said Simon Huntley, CEO of Harvie.
Mr. Huntley grew up on a farm in Greene County, the son of a coal mining father. As a kid, he eschewed both farming and mining for computers and programming.
He gravitated back to farming after getting an information technology degree from Penn State University, wondering if there could be a way to use tech to improve agriculture.
In 2006, he founded Small Farm Central — later called Harvie — and began helping farms establish the CSA programs that were becoming more popular through the 2000s.
For a small farmer, a CSA can be a helpful revenue stream at a time of year that farm operations are just gearing up and costs are high. Customers usually pay the full year’s price when they sign up in February or March. (Feb. 22 was National CSA Sign-Up Day.)
And with the expansion of online grocery shopping, Seattle online retailer Amazon’s purchase of natural foods grocer Whole Foods, and the growth of food delivery services like Blue Apron, CSAs provide an avenue for local farms to
compete for customers who are demanding more flexibility.
As Mr. Huntley gathered more farms as clients, he discovered some of the things that customers weren’t so thrilled about with CSAs.
Many saw the rations as an expensive upfront cost only to get an unpredictable load of second-rate farm goods, he said. Retention rates were a problem, with about 46 percent of CSA customers renewing their purchase the following year, according to a 2015 survey of his clients.
“You love your local farmer, but you get those beets and you put them in the bottom of your fridge until they turn black,” he said. “And you feel bad about it every time you open the fridge.”
Peas and onions
CSAs have a high barrier of entry even for experienced farmers.
Farms have to grow a diversity of produce — 20 to 30 different crops, Mr. Harvie suggested — and grow them reliably enough to fill a box every week. It is a significant amount of work to manage, harvest, pack and ship consistently through the growing season.
Marketing and customer service duties are often too much to handle on top of farm labor.
Before the 2017 growing season, Mr. Huntley’s company launched a platform to address the disconnect.
The platform uses an algorithm that takes a farm’s harvest estimates and matches it with each customer’s preferences.
In its third year, about 100 farms across the United States will use the Harvie platform. Those farms total about 30,000 consumers who will receive 500,000 shares delivered this year, Mr. Huntley said.
Harvie attempts to strike a balance between giving customers a choice and recognizing that farmers plan their crops for an entire year.
Neil Stauffer, distribution manager for Rivendale Farms, said he has experience working both with CSAs that allow customers to come to the farm to pick what they want and those that give customers only what the farm decides.
“This one kind of hits a sweet spot,” Mr. Stauffer said.
Previously, it could be a stressful task to sit down and sort all the products into $25 boxes.
“What do I do if I have 100 boxes to fill and only 25 pints of sugar snap peas? Who’s going to get those? Harvie kind of takes that pressure off my shoulders. We’re going to give them to the people who rated it higher.”
Another Harvie user, Jodi Danyo, owner of Cherry Valley Organics in Burgettstown, said the platform has helped with the complicated math of distributing goods with a different shelf life. Broccoli and tomatoes are perishable and should be shipped immediately, while onions can wait.
Harvie has also unlocked a powerful tool: a torrent of consumer data.
With feedback from the preferences, Ms. Danyo said, she learned people want more fruit with their vegetables.
Even with Harvie’s help, “It might still be a little bit overwhelming” to meet demand, she said.
“One of the challenges is to, depending on peoples’ preferences, offer enough diversity,” Ms. Danyo said.
Sourcing local
The push to improve CSA programs comes amid a renewed interest in sourcing food from local farms and harnessing technology to achieve those goals. In November, hundreds of people packed the Pittsburgh region’s first conference on ag tech — a daylong discussion that set goals for farmers, software coders, restaurant owners and others.
Separately, state officials have launched a $3.5 million program to study how to better grow and distribute farm goods throughout southwestern Pennsylvania.
Ms. Keezer, who lived for several years in California before moving back to Pittsburgh last year, had gotten used to the abundance of fresh farm products and home delivery services in Los Angeles. Pittsburgh’s climate and the region’s smaller farms do not allow for luxuries on such a scale.
Ms. Keezer, who is director of the Pittsburgh Film Office, brought together a dozen other families in her Mt. Lebanon neighborhood to sign up for the Rivendale’s CSA so the farm would deliver to her home.
“It’s a way to connect to your local food, and adding the technology piece is going to help local farmers,” she said. “It’s just fun.”