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Cherries have a 2–3 week harvest window. Turkey lost 60% of its crop to frost this year. Greek retail prices up 400%. In...
29/05/2026

Cherries have a 2–3 week harvest window. Turkey lost 60% of its crop to frost this year. Greek retail prices up 400%. In a window this tight, the farmer with no confirmed buyer has nowhere to go. Cherries make every supply chain problem impossible to ignore.

Most crops give you some room to breathe. A few weeks to find a buyer, negotiate, wait for a better price.Cherries don't...
29/05/2026

Most crops give you some room to breathe. A few weeks to find a buyer, negotiate, wait for a better price.

Cherries don't.

The harvest window for fresh cherries is 2 to 3 weeks. In some regions, less. When the fruit is ready, it's ready - and if there's no confirmed buyer waiting, the farmer's options narrow very fast. Sell at whatever price is on offer that day. Watch it rot. Or dump it.

This is why cherries make every problem in the farm food supply chain more visible than almost any other crop. The time pressure strips away any margin for error. And when something goes wrong at a market level - a frost, a glut, a supplier collapse - the farmer with no direct buyer relationship feels it immediately and completely.

This season is a sharp example. Severe frosts in April across Europe and Turkey drastically reduced harvests - Turkey alone saw a production drop of nearly 60%, with exports expected to fall by 85%. In Greece, retail prices spiked by over 400%. Some farmers with confirmed buyers did well. Many others — caught between a destroyed crop and no fallback - did not.

The cherry window doesn't forgive the absence of a relationship. It just makes the cost of not having one impossible to ignore.

Are you a cherry grower or cherry buyer in our community? Tell us where you are and how this season is treating you. 👇

We've spent this series talking about what goes wrong in the farm food supply chain. Fertilizer costs squeezing farmers ...
26/05/2026

We've spent this series talking about what goes wrong in the farm food supply chain.

Fertilizer costs squeezing farmers in Kenya and Karnataka. Cold chain gaps destroying produce before it reaches anyone. Commodity prices set by speculators thousands of miles from the farm. Middlemen capturing value that never reaches the people who grew the food.

We've seen all of that. We believe all of that is real and worth talking about.

But we also want to end here - with what we actually see when it works.

Trust in the farm food supply chain doesn't look like a policy change or a new regulation. It looks like a buyer in Johannesburg who has been ordering from the same farmer in Limpopo for two years and never missed a payment.

It looks like a chef in Cape Town who puts a farm's name on the menu because she wants her customers to know who grew what they're eating. It looks like a farmer producer organisation in Karnataka that finally has a buyer who shows up consistently, and the farmer members who are planting next season's crop with more confidence because of it.

We've been building Farmlovers across 84 countries because we believe these relationships are the point - and that what they need is not to be replaced by a platform, but to be made easier to form, and harder to break.

This is your community. We want to hear your story.

Have you found a direct buyer or a farmer you trust? Tell us where in the world you are and what changed when that relationship started. 👇

Here's something we've been following in our community that tells you almost everything about how the global food system...
25/05/2026

Here's something we've been following in our community that tells you almost everything about how the global food system works - and who it works for.

In late 2024, cocoa hit a record $12,900 per metric ton. Arabica coffee prices were up over 100% in a year. The headlines talked about the crisis for chocolate makers, the rising price of your morning cup, the pressure on buyers everywhere.

What the headlines said less about: the smallholder farmers who grew it. 🧑‍🌾

Because here's what we keep hearing - and what the data confirms.

When commodity prices spike, the gains don't reliably reach the farmers at the bottom of the chain. Climate shocks, disease, flooding, drought - these are hitting the farms hardest, increasing labour and costs at exactly the moment that global prices are rising.

The farmer is working harder, spending more, and still not capturing the windfall that traders and speculators see on the exchange floor. 😠

And then the price fell. By mid-2025, cocoa had dropped 43% from its peak. The same farmers who didn't benefit much from the spike now face lower prices on a crop that cost more to produce.

This is what it looks like when a farmer has no connection to the market that sets their price. The number goes up and down thousands of miles away. They find out when the buyer tells them.

Does this pattern look familiar from where you farm or buy? We'd love to hear from our community. 👇

One of the quiet revolutions we keep hearing about from our community in East Africa isn't about farming at all. It's ab...
24/05/2026

One of the quiet revolutions we keep hearing about from our community in East Africa isn't about farming at all. It's about how money moves. 💸💸💸

For a smallholder farmer in rural Kenya or Tanzania, getting paid used to mean one of two things: cash on the spot at the market, or waiting (sometimes weeks) for a buyer to settle up. Cash meant carrying it home.

Waiting meant having no visibility on when or whether it would arrive. Both created a dependency on whoever was closest and most convenient, which usually meant the middleman.

M-Pesa changed that for millions of farmers. Not completely, not everywhere, and not without its own complications. But when a buyer can send payment to a phone the moment goods change hands - and the farmer can see it arrive in real time - something shifts. The transaction becomes verifiable. The relationship becomes slightly more equal. The farmer doesn't have to take whoever is standing in front of them.

What's striking is that fewer than 15% of African smallholder farmers currently receive digital payments for their produce, despite mobile money pe*******on exceeding 80% of adults in Kenya.

The infrastructure exists. The gap between what's technically possible and what actually happens in the field is still enormous.

We're curious: in our community across Africa, how are you actually getting paid? And has that changed in the last few years? 👇

There's a number the farmer doesn't know. And a number the buyer doesn't know. And somewhere between those two numbers, ...
22/05/2026

There's a number the farmer doesn't know. And a number the buyer doesn't know. And somewhere between those two numbers, most of the value disappears.

We've been building Farmlovers across 84 countries, and this is the pattern we keep running into - in Karnataka, in Kenya, in South Africa, in Eastern Europe.

The farmer knows what they received. The buyer knows what they paid. Neither knows what the other knows. And the gap between those two figures - often 40 to 60% of the final price - flows to the layers in between. 🔃

This isn't a story about villains. The middlemen in most supply chains do real work: aggregating small volumes, managing logistics, extending credit, absorbing risk. The problem isn't that they exist.

The problem is that their combined cut leaves the farmer with just enough to survive - particularly in Asia and Africa, where the margins are thinnest and the alternatives fewest. We've seen farmers selling below the cost of production because they had no other buyer and no way to wait.

What we keep coming back to is this: the middleman doesn't win because of greed. He wins because he knows what the buyer paid yesterday. The farmer doesn't. That information gap - not malice, just information - is where value quietly transfers every single day across millions of transactions.

What would change if both sides could just see the same number?
Tell us what you've seen in your own supply chain. 👇

Something we keep hearing from our community in the US, and it comes with a real contradiction at the heart of it.More A...
21/05/2026

Something we keep hearing from our community in the US, and it comes with a real contradiction at the heart of it.
More American chefs than ever say they want to source directly from farms. Surveys suggest 76% of diners are more likely to visit a restaurant that does exactly that. The appetite - from both sides of the kitchen pass - is genuine. 🧑‍🍳

And yet the direct farm-to-restaurant relationship is still the exception, not the rule.

What we hear from our community is that when it works, it works because of one thing above all else: a personal relationship built over time. A chef who drives out to a farm. A farmer who picks up the phone when there's a problem with an order.

Trust that gets tested, holds, and deepens. You can't rush it, and you can't outsource it to a distributor.

What makes it hard is everything the distributor used to handle quietly in the background. Consistency. Insurance. Invoicing. Delivery on a Tuesday when the restaurant needs it by 6am. The logistics that nobody talks about until they go wrong.

Between 2023 and 2024, the US lost nearly 15,000 farms 😢 with small, family-run operations making up the majority of those closures. The farms most likely to survive long-term are increasingly the ones building direct relationships. The chefs who make those relationships work are creating something that can't be taken from them by a price change from a national distributor.

We'd love to hear from anyone in our community doing this — in the US or anywhere else. What made the connection happen, and what nearly broke it? g

We've been watching the European farmer protests on TV for over a year now. Tractors blocking Brussels. Produce dumped o...
18/05/2026

We've been watching the European farmer protests on TV for over a year now. Tractors blocking Brussels. Produce dumped on motorways. Farmers from France, Germany, Poland, Belgium - different languages, same anger. 😠

And the easy read is: farmers versus green policy. Farmers versus Ukrainian imports. Farmers versus bureaucrats in suits.
But when you listen longer, something more familiar comes through.

The farmers blocking those roads aren't the biggest operations - the ones with economies of scale, export contracts, and the resources to absorb new regulation.

They're the smaller farms. The ones where the margin between a viable year and a ruinous one is already razor thin. The ones who feel squeezed from every direction - by input costs, by supermarket price pressure, by imports produced under different rules, and now by environmental compliance they can't afford to implement.

It's a different continent and a different context from what we hear in Karnataka or Kenya. But the frustration underneath it is the same: the person doing the growing feels like the last one to be considered when decisions get made about the food system.

We're curious - if you're farming in Europe, or buying from European farms: what does this look like from where you stand? 👇

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