Farming+Crowdfunding=Farmhopping?

Wednesday, July 18 2012

Farming+Crowdfunding=Farmhopping?

Good magazine reports on a new kind of Crowd funding, aimed at helping small-scale farmers:

Farming is a creative practice with a final product more spectacular than anything manmade: fresh produce, delicious meat, fragrant flowers, and a well cared for landscape. So in the social media age, when people are willing to donate money in support of a stranger’s creativity through platforms like Kickstarter, it makes sense to try to extend that generosity to the world of agriculture, allowing people to give to small farms whose missions they support.

Enter Farmhopping, a website launching next month that intends to create a new framework for financing small-scale farming by connecting farms with backers who pay a small sum to invest in a farm for rewards, like shipments of cheese, and a say in how the farm is managed…

Mitova says some people have compared the idea to “Farmville but with real animals,” but she frowns at the suggestion. “We don’t want to just make entertainment,” she says. “We want to make people part of a community, part of a lifestyle.” And unlike an entertaininment platform, Farmhopping poses real solutions to cash-flow problems for small farmers…

[Future] farms to be included in the platform will be a water buffalo farm that produces authentic mozzarella and another farm that keeps sheep and bees. The eventual goal is to create a list with farms from around the world that reflect different concerns, whether protecting heritage breeds or permaculture. “We’ll have to visit each farm and make sure that the farm is a good match for us, that we are a good match for a farm, that they’re taking care of the animal in a sustainable way.” It’s a hugely ambitious project for a young entreprneur—or for anyone, really—but Mitova doesn’t seem to mind.

Read the full story here. The farmhopping.com site is still under construction but should be live soon.