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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

1 is not a bad idea. I have an alternative idea where chefs (and anyone else) can post what high quality produce (heritage breeds, etc) they want and how much they will pay for the produce. Farmers could then bid on these requests. This way rather than having to select from what is available, or the farmer having to guess what the market wants, the farmer grows what is wanted by the market and they know how much they will earn. Rather than grow the tasteless varieties that crop and look good, they will grow the varieties that actually taste good.

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Great idea. A contract growing scheme on a small scale. Community groups (churches, neighbors etc) might even want to get involved. Prepayment for at least some of the growing cost would be nice for the growers (CSA style). I suppose a rating system on growers would be needed also.

Yes it could really be expanded outside of the just the restaurant business. Having once had a garden where I grew my own heritage produce I really, really, really miss the quality of those crops - the taste was just fantastic. I now live in an apartment and would pay a significant premium to get someone to supply them to me again.

One final tweak would be to allow people to also select organic growers as well - I personally would not care, but I suspect it would be a big market for this.

Interesting, I hadn't really considered the market outside of restaurants. Typically the price of organic, locally grown (although it doesn't have to be limited to just organic) produce is higher per pound than similar produce found at supermarkets. Do you think that community groups would be interested in paying more, or would have the budget to pay more?

I thought the same thing when I was trying to flesh this idea out a bit more, but the more I've spoken with farmers, the less I think this is the right way to go. The downside to doing this approach is that for many small farmers contract farming is all but assured. What if it doesn't rain when it needs to? What if you have an odd cold snap that wipes a crop? What if your planned delivery date of particular produce is delayed because things aren't growing as well as they should?

These are all things that happen with a fair amount of regularity on small farms, and things that many good restaurants would be flexible enough to accommodate, but it would sort of negate the benefits of planning out menus at the beginning of a season.

I would ideally love to see this idea extend to foragers as well. It would be kind of amazing to have local foragers post their pounds of morels and fiddlehead ferns and see local chefs snap them up.

All these problems are inherent to farming in general and farmers are used to dealing with them. Restaurants can plan around the lack of some produce at very short notice (they are used to doing this now), what chefs lack is a good way to pass the information of what they want grown. A little of this goes on right now when chefs talk directly to farmers about the sort of produce they want, but it is small scale and inefficient. No farmer can commit to growing a specialised crop without knowing the demand for it in advance. It is the sort of problem where the demand is present, but the communication is missing.

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