The LocalHarvest Blog

It's nearly Christmas, but instead of sugar plums, I have numbers dancing in my head. Membership and site traffic numbers, year-end and pricing survey numbers. I'm a words-over-formulas kind of girl, so believe me, this is a rare day. Still, these are interesting statistics. Some we feel proud of, some we are humbled by.

Here's a few that please us: LocalHarvest welcomed 3,675 new member listings so far in 2008. That's ten new members every day! Of these, 2,583 were farmers, 590 were farmers markets, and the remainder were restaurants, co-ops, and the like. The LocalHarvest database now offers information on nearly 18,000 farms and farmers markets (etc.) nationwide. As always, our marketing budget for 2008 was exactly $0, so we have all of you to thank for helping us spread the word about LocalHarvest. Mil gracias!

Over 3.8 million people found local food with LocalHarvest's help this year, a million more than in 2007. Our monthly newsletter goes out to 54,000 people like yourself, and 75,000 people get our weekly Keep Me Posted updates. Over 16,200 people bought products through our catalog this year. Numbers on two new LH projects look like this: to date, 831 farmers have added Ark of Taste products to their LocalHarvest listings since we launched our partnership with Slow Food in April. In the last two months, nearly 300 farms have started blogging with us, posting stories about life on the farm, recipes, photos, and videos.

We had really hoped to give you the results of our first LocalHarvest pricing project: "How Does Local Compare?" but, unfortunately, we don't have those numbers yet. This is the 'humbling' part I mentioned up top. It turns out that crunching the data in a meaningful way is an exceptionally complex proposition. We've been at it on and off for a week and are still slogging through the fine points. I promise we will keep at it, and I will have the results for you in our January newsletter.

As we approach the end of 2008 we would like to thank all of you for supporting your local farmers and LocalHarvest. In these uncertain economic times, it feels particularly important to spend our food dollars on fresh, nutritious food grown by people whose chosen work is to feed our communities. Real food for the people!

As always, take good care, and eat well.

See you in '09,

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST