The Story of Computer Technology at the Farm

Spring is approaching again, and I see that it's been nearly a year since our last blog posting. One of the challenges as we incorporate all this new technology into our business life is knowing what to use when. At this point, we have a website, a blog, a facebook page, and email has become the primary form of communication between the farm and our members.

This is a very different situation from 1998, when we started the CSA. At that time, we had only a very old, seldom used DOS based computer, no website, and hadn't even considered using email. The FAX machine was the big technological tool in the farm office, and everything was still done on paper.

Somewhere around 2001, Farmer Karen had concluded that we really needed to be using email for communication from members. Many of our members at that time (and now, for that matter) were very web-savvy individuals who liked the convenience of email. They found that email was a more efficient way of communicating, and they wanted that connection with the farm as well. Around the same time, Karen visited some friends, and came home with the idea for our domain name- csachestercounty.com. This was before SEO or search engine optimization, was popular, so our domain name was chosen to boost our rankings in search engines.

Once the website was created, we essentially went dormant on technology for a number of years. We had many projects outside, and went through several major changes in the equipment used to run the farm. During this time we also expanded the size of the CSA, and steadily moved more and more to email for our communication needs. In 2009 we started this blog with the hope that it would be a way to share more of what's going on at the farm with members and friends of the farm.

The next major technological innovation didn't come until recently, in January of 2011. After a lot of research and discussion, Karen made the decision to move to Farmigo for our CSA record keeping needs. This cloud based productivity application has simplified our record keeping, and will provide an interactive member portal through which our CSA members can order additional items to be delivered with their share. www.farmigo.com