Farmers' exclusive App offers one-stop management to lower risks
Original title: "Good Farm" App builds a trustworthy food community
Launch ceremony of the Good Farm APP (file photo, source: People's Daily Online)
As a farm manager, Deng Xiaogang of Guangdong Shennong Tianyuan once struggled with how to manage members' orders, and even made mistakes because of it.
"Once, near the Spring Festival, a member told me via WeChat that she had gone to another city, and then gave me an address, asking me to deliver the vegetables to a friend." Deng Xiaogang said he agreed readily at the time, but never expected that for various reasons, he completely forgot the member's instruction. As a result, the member not only began to doubt the farm's management standards, but the farm also missed a good opportunity to promote itself within a "circle of acquaintances."
Many farm operators have had similar experiences. However, they may no longer need to worry about this now.
On November 19, China's first IT company specializing in services for community-supported agriculture - Chengshi (Beijing) Agricultural Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Chengshi Agriculture) - officially released an App called "Good Farm." This application integrates e-commerce, information-based management, and social networking, and is dedicated to building the most trustworthy healthy food community in China, providing consumers and producers with an e-commerce platform and a service platform.
"The Good Farm platform firmly believes that 'consumption is voting.'" At the launch event, Good Farm CEO Cheng Cunwang said, "By driving transformation on the production side through the consumption side, this model can provide creative solutions to the problems of domestic food safety and agricultural pollution. Good Farm is committed to serving consumers on the one hand and supporting producers on the other, contributing our value to building China's agriculture and food safety."
For consumers, the Good Farm App, which brings together CSA (community-supported agriculture) and organic ecological farms across the country, is an e-commerce platform. A reporter's trial found that as soon as the application is opened, it can locate farms around the user's city of residence, making browsing, ordering, and checkout convenient and quick. Because it brings together many farms, the products available for consumers to choose from are also greatly enriched.
At the same time, in order to rebuild the trust system between consumers and farm owners, the Good Farm platform creatively established a crowdsourced participation system. This is a system based on trust, social networks, and knowledge sharing that evaluates farms through the activities of local stakeholders.
It is reported that the company will cooperate with professional testing companies to conduct quality inspections of all farms, randomly select members to participate in the sampling process; at the same time, after visiting farms, members can produce public inspection reports, which together with testing reports provide other consumers with more reliable sources of information for choosing farms. This approach of incorporating the consumer community into the supervision process has a huge role in promoting the rebuilding of the social trust system.
In addition to meeting consumer-side needs, the Good Farm App covers farm owners' operational management needs, providing farm owners with one-stop support in information management, e-commerce, testing, logistics, finance, and other aspects.
Through the Good Farm App, farm owners can learn about members' ordering activity at any time and anywhere, exchange production experience, and consult agricultural experts. Moreover, the platform provides channels for product exchange and circulation between farms, so farm owners no longer need to worry about excess or insufficient production, effectively avoiding long-term market risks and solving the problem of poor farm management.
It is disclosed that the platform will also launch financial services, providing crowdfunding guarantees for start-up farm owners to obtain start-up capital and members, solving the financing difficulties in the agricultural sector, and supporting farm owners in using agricultural products as collateral for loans, expanding production, and providing consumers with a richer variety of organic foods.
At the same time, the platform will provide high-quality logistics services. By cooperating with professional cold-chain logistics companies, it will comprehensively improve logistics quality and reduce logistics costs, solving the difficulty of same-city fresh logistics delivery from farms to members' dining tables.
In order to help farm owners expand channels for recruiting members, Chengshi Agriculture will also cooperate with large real estate developers such as Vanke and Vantone to link communities and farms in cities with high concentrations of farms, further promoting the development and growth of the CSA model in China.
"The purpose of Chengshi Agriculture in building this comprehensive service platform is to connect consumers and producers, popularize the concept of healthy living consumption from both ends of the agricultural value chain, and build the most trustworthy healthy food community. Incorporate consumers into the agricultural product traceability system, increase consumers' understanding and acceptance of ecological agriculture, and thereby stimulate producers to choose healthier and more environmentally friendly organic farming methods." Cheng Cunwang said. (Reporter Hu Xuanzi)