Producers Market directly addresses the challenge of innovation for inclusive trade through data driven empowerment models that support the organization of farmers, and the aggregation of their outputs to reach markets and consumers more directly in local, regional, national and international markets. In emerging markets farmers are dependent on traders, brokers, conglomerate manufacturers, and other intermediaries for the post-harvest purchase of their outputs. These commercial value chain stakeholders have business models that incentives them to always seek to reduce raw material costs while maximizing their sales prices. This model of "buy-low, sell-high" business is structurally misaligned to farmers interest, and has caused trillions of dollars of damages to soil, water, and community resources and have kept farmers in poverty. The Producers Market model seeks to assist in the data capture, and post-harvest organization of farmers, and farmer outputs to achieve scaled supply offerings to achieve supplier power and access to a diversity of higher valued markets. With this capture of data, and the building of historical sales and production evidence, farmers can become accessible individually for lower-rate micro loans, and collectively for public-private-partnership equity and debt finance, and other forms of working capital, accounts receivables, and project finance.
Producers Market is connecting the farm-level data into a storytelling UI/UX application design that connects into upstream packaging, and point of sale locations so end-consumers can "vote with their dollars" and have confidence that the products they are purchasing through the Producers Market value chain are to the tangible and validated benefit of farmers, their environment and communities.
The linkage of markets, and ultimately consumers to their farmers, results in consumers providing new economic incentives for farmers to switch practices to organic, regenerative and fair trade, and in turn result in a monumental adoption of natural farming solutions, and the capture of carbon into our soil, and the regeneration of water tables.
Digitization holds a solution to empower and uplift those most vulnerable on the supply chain. However it moves from an idealized value chain to a realized value chain once farmers aggregate their supplier power, and achieve more direct value chains.
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