Tuesday, 17 March 2009 at 11:30AM
Panel:
- Rachel Weidinger (Mktg Dir & Sr Consultant, Common Knowledge)
- Humberto Kam (Sr Mgr Online Communications, Monterey Bay Aquarium)
- Andrew MacRae (Get Involved)
- Melanie Cheng (Founder, FarmsReach.com), (Pres, Common Knowledge)
Description: Nonprofits and social entrepreneurs are making access to sustainable food easier with shortcodes, social networks, advocacy tools, and location-based platforms. The founder ofFarmsreach will share her vision for this web platform for local, sustainable food. We’ll discuss the evolution of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch to mobile access, and the recent launch of their iPhone app. The advocacy work of the American Farmland Trust will be covered, including some surprises about SEM. We’ll share how the Sierra Club’s global warming social network Climate Crossroads is using food to engage users in a challenging issue.
FarmsReach (http://farmsreach.com/)
They provide technical means for geographically matching businesses with local distributors so they can coordinated delivery and place orders online. They exploit the existing delivery routes the farmers already use or they connect the buyers to farmer’s markets for delivery. Basically, they want to align supply and demand to minimize the distance food moves. They are attempting to bring an offline community online. twitter: @farmsreach
No Farms No Food
There is a lot of people who are keenly interested in healthy, environmental food, but they don’t quite make the full loop connection to the farmer. This project attempts to connect this loop - trying to create a sustainable relationship for the farmers’ food. Strange fact: search traffic for farmer’s markets is more owned by Yahoo search than Google. There are demographic differences and perhaps a broadband difference in rural areas. His data shows that it is not affluent suburbia driving this, but rural and remote people.
http://climatecrossroads.org/
This is project of the Sierra Club. 1.3 million members. This is a social network with an agenda to get people thinking and talking about climate change. Local food is the “gateway drug” to get people looking at the larger problem. Focused on the US, not international. The site is not heavily Sierra Club branded and it is in beta now. Two primary areas she focused upon: Actions and Recipes.
Monterey Bay Aquarium - Sustainable seafood movement
What fish should one choose? Half of our seafood comes from wild sea stocks and we are just depleting them left and right. It is esitmate that 1 in 4 animals die as bycatch. Estimate 90% of fish stocks gone by 2050 at current rates. Is fish farming the answer? It depends. Many fish farms feed their fish with wild stock. Saturation of antibiotics is a problem.
Seafood Watch: seafood guides in the form of pocket guides. AND an iPhone app. I downloaded it as he spoke. Very cool. They have used this app as a springboard toupdate their mobile apps. It is fully integrated into Google Maps. SeafoodWatch.org.
Weird fact: There is no comprehensive listing of farmer’s markets that is not proprietary. Wow.
Refernced stuff:
- Wiki: http://savefood.wikispaces.com/
- EcoTrust has a policy mapping project for salmon strategy
- Foodzie: like an ebay for local foods close to you.
- Sierra Club: Climate Crossroads
- GoodGuide
- Wattz On (Dave says it is a cool site)
- Eat Well Guide - “Cultivating the Web”
- film: end of the line
- gvfoods?
- farmersmarketsource.com
All this will be on slideshare.