Idea Storm

The Green Dell

May 3, 2013

1 Vote

Status: Acknowledged

A website where home gardners and small farmers can put up their crops that they are planning, planting, growing, harvesting - and see, by "locality," what others are planting in their neighbourhood. The idea is that they can then perhaps change their minds and plant something no-one else is growing, leading to greater diversity of foods available in their region. People can then either opt to buy these direct from the grower, or trade them for something that they grow themselves, and the idea is to make every region able to grow good local food. The "locality" should be an area that makes sense for local food, i.e. not much more than 20 - 50 miles, to encourage people to use less fuel transporting food around.People should be able to "pledge" either a certain percentage of a planted or harvested crop, or pledge some labour on the grower's property (sort of like community gardening) or tools and materials (wire netting, compost scraps, etc) in exchange for some of the crop. Additionally, users should be encouraged to share their experiences of what grows well locally, what needs special techniques, and so forth. Within a few years, a site such as this should be able to even out local food production, provide detailed, locality-based advice on what can be grown and how to grow it, and (if advertisers are chosen carefully and with relevance, i.e. home handyman, gardening, nursery, and so forth) be able to produce an income by presenting locally-targeted advertising to users, who can use these ads to find the best local services and materials.It would be a crowdsourced agricultural and GIS dataBASE, as well. This can be stripped of identifying data, and sold/donated to research foundations and government departments to provide detailed knowledge of soil and weather and local plants etc on an ongoing basis. The information provided would give valuable knowledge to such organisations about the health of the ecosphere and the weather systems.On the purely humane side, it would allow a much wider audience to have access to local food, thus strengthening local economies and reducing food miles and handling costs. I think an idea such as this is one of theose things where a large company has nothing to lose by devoting a few resources to it and advertising / publicising it, and then if the site doesn't take off, it's a relatively small loss. If it does take of though, it would establish the green credentials of the company and give them some very good publicity!

1 Votes | 0 Comment

Categories: Education, Environment, IdeaStorm,

Top Recent Contributors