Transparent Farmers: how farmers are using technology for new ways of selling and communicating with consumers

Abstract

There is a growing number of farmers embracing information and communication technologies (ICT) as a way of enabling direct sales to consumers and creating added value through involving the consumers and making food production more transparent. This article presents the case of Nybrukarna, a community supported agriculture (CSA) cooperative in the south of Sweden, and explores how social media is used in their operation. The social media posts during a growing season were analyzed and used to identify different cases. Three main themes were identified: (1) practical communication and feedback from customers; (2) increasing transparency of crop production and values; (3) marketing and direct sales. These results were combined with information from a survey with feedback of the CSA customers, and a survey with growers in similar context, for identifying and discussing challenges, drivers, and opportunities for future development and research.

Growing Tiny Publics

“…In this quote, it is implied that customers who are new to local food don't want detailed information about the realities of sustainable farming. (This idea is consistent with Zapico and Soderberg's finding that the majority of their CSA customers did not value "more detailed knowledge about crops and techniques" in their social media posts [80].) However, there also seems to be a tension between the desire to be open and the need to make sales by glossing over "the bad stuff."…”

“…They propose food democracy as a theoretical framing for HCI work that engages with food systems, and identify six strategies for scholars and designers to make food systems more democratic. Also relevant to our study is a paper by Zapico and Söderberg [80] which describes how a food cooperative in Sweden strategically uses social media to make food production more transparent to consumers. Their work provides a more detailed account of some of the un-blackboxing strategies mentioned in Section 5.2.…”