Tom Davenport.
hen Tom Davenport took over the management of Hollin Farms near Delaplane in the mid 1990’s, he knew he would need to change a lot of things. The farm was losing money. The advice from most agricultural experts was: “get big or get out.” It was hard enough to complete with big Western ranchers and Midwest grain farmers. Now family farms had to compete with Brazilian soybeans and New Zealand lamb.
But Tom didn’t want to give up on the family farm. He had a son Matthew in the Peace Corps who wanted to come back to run the farm. “My wife Mimi and I had returned to Virginia in 1970 to establish a cottage-industry film business—making documentaries about folklore and dramatic films based on fairy tales and selling them from home like cane chairs. We had skills marketing niche movies. Why not farm products?”
A big change occurred in the late 1990’s with the rapid development of the Internet, which is uniquely suited to niche marketing. Northern Virginia was an especially promising market, with a large suburban population within driving distance of Hollin Farms.
Mimi had learned how to design a website in 1998 when she made one for PBS for their children’s feature film “Willa: An American Snow White.” Tom and Mimi put together the www.hollinfarms.com website a year later.
The Hollinfarms.com website quickly became an easy way to post information, prices, and directions. Tom no longer had to spend hours on the phone explaining his Hollin Farms Angus beef program. He could refer customers to the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) on the website.
During this period Tom teamed up with other filmmakers to create www.folkstreams. net—a site to video stream important documentaries about the roots of American culture. Who would program a movie on a one-legged, medicine-show blues harmonica player on CBS? But on the Internet these films found an audience.
Working on Folkstreams, Tom met Steve Knoblock, a computer programmer and designer living in Arlington. They realized that they had an unusual synergy: Steve was an expert programmer and Tom was a farmer who had adapted to the Internet early on. From this meeting was born www.farmfoody.org.
There are national directories of farms already on the Internet, like LocalHarvest.org or EatWild.org. But they are not interactive. Steve introduced Tom to the idea of the social network. Websites like Facebook allow people to become friends. “Popular music groups have fans as friends. Why not farms?”
Tom discovered that most farmers rarely update their site more than once a year.
A goal of Farmfoody.org was to make posting farm information much easier. The farmer can change his farm’s profile, create bulletins about what produce is ready, post directions, videos, photos, and FAQ’s almost as easily as writing an email.
Foodies are like a farm’s fans. They join and search for farms and food nearby. They “make friends” with their favorite farms. Once friendship is established, these farms show up on the foody’s personal map, and the foody receives bulletins from the farm.
To get the site started, Tom and Steve seeded it with Virginia PYO farms, farmers’ markets, and vineyards. They also think that new suburban “victory gardeners” may find the site because it is geographically oriented around zip codes, and it is easy to create communities of friends who are interested in fresh, inexpensive food near each other.
