Stewards of the Earth Farmers Market

Most tech platforms chase growth, raise venture capital, and exit within a decade. LocallyGrown.net has been doing the opposite since 2002: staying small, staying sustainable, and staying committed to the same mission—helping farmers markets and local food communities thrive online. This is the story of how a failed wholesale cooperative accidentally became agricultural infrastructure, survived three recessions and a pandemic, nearly died from its own success, and was completely rebuilt to last another 23 years. — Eric Wagoner, Founder and Developer Where It Started: A 1970s Homestead Kid My story with local food didn't begin in 2002. It began in the 1970s as a child of "back to the land" parents. I grew up on a small homestead with a large garden, poultry, milk goats, and the joy that comes from tasting fresh food grown close at hand. That sensibility never left me. By 1999, I was renting a hundred-year-old farmhouse outside Athens, Georgia, with my own garden providing the fresh ingredients I couldn't find at any store. In fall 2001, I got married and bought a patch of land with the dream of having our own small market farm. I started attending planning meetings of the small Athens farmers markets that existed at the time, immersing myself in the local food community.I was a brand new farmer and a software developer—a rare combination that would turn out to matter more than I knew. 2002: The Failed Experiment That Changed Everything It was at one of those farmers market meetings that Dan and Kris Miller, who ran their small farm Heirloom Organics, approached me with a problem: how could small local growers cooperate to reach more customers while staying independent? Their original idea was straightforward—pool produce, create a single point of sale, focus on restaurants. They weren't looking forward to managing spreadsheets to keep everything organized, but maybe, they wondered, I could help them make a better way. I built them a simple system usingOSCommerce, a free open-source e-commerce platform. Dan and Kris valiantly ran their cooperative for two years, but the restaurant wholesale model didn't work—Athens was too inexpensive, and the farms were too small to supply commercial kitchens reliably. But something unexpected happened during that failed experiment. Individual customers started placing small orders through the primitive system I'd cobbled together.What began as a wholesale platform accidentally became something entirely new: what I believe was the world's first online farmers market. The Innovation That Solved Everything We stumbled onto a simple weekly cycle that addressed problems farmers and customers had been wrestling with for decades: No more speculative harvesting. No more "mystery CSA boxes." No more arriving at dawn hoping the good stuff was still available.Everything harvested was already sold. By 2004, Dan and Kris recognized that the technical platform and market management had become the heart of the operation. They handed the entire business over to me, and they remained as vendors—growing and selling their produce through the system. This transition made me not just the platform developer, but the owner-operator of what would become the flagship Athens Locally Grown market. I was building e-commerce infrastructure for a movement that barely existed, during the dial-up internet era, before "farm-to-table" was mainstream. 2005–2006: Farmers Conferences and a Critical Realization By 2005, our Athens market was attracting nationwide attention. I was being invited to farming conferences across the country—including the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SSAWG) in New Orleans—to show off our system. My initial advice was always the same: use the open-source tools I used (OSCommerce) and build your own version. But conversati