Hello FarmOS! I found your site because a colleague of mine who does farm research for Ohio State University sang its praises and suggested I contact you. I am the PI on an urban agriculture production and sales system that we have been piloting in Mansfield, Ohio since 2019. We have trained a dozen new farmers to grow market crops on what we call “microfarms.” The microfarm is designed to be a “right-sized” urban crop production site, being small enough for a single farmer or household to work ~20/30 hrs/wk, large enough to bring a potential household supplementary income of $30-35,000. They are comprised of 6,000 square feet of growing area, half of which is under high tunnel solar greenhouses for extended season growing. We also facilitated the creation of a farmer-owned cooperative, which develops annual crop plans with all the farmers, based on buyer orders. We need farmOS for each farm, but we also need that data to flow into aggregation, sorting, re-boxing, and point of sale. I’ve attached a crude powerpoint diagram of our information flow. So my question is whether farmOS has the capability to add this extended data stream, from centralized (cop plan), to decentralized (farm plan), to centralized (harvest #), to decentralized (#s/$ per farm)? We are pursuing a small grant to find/develop the right system for our farmers and their cooperative. Thank you for any advice or suggestions! Warmly, Kip Curtis, OSU
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