In short, the food basket, also called the farmer's basket, is a customized basket of local agricultural products for daily individual consumption, which is put together by a center of coordination, with crops from a number of local farms. This center matches the needs of consumers with the local producers. It is a flat decentralized organization. It uses the new technology to coordinate the production by helping farmers decide on the type of crops and on quantities, in accordance to market demands. It manages inventories, by coordinating output from farmers with the distribution towards consumers. It acts as a virtual store, where consumers can customize their purchases according to their individual needs. It offers various payment modalities and convenient delivery.
The food basket is a complete product, put together through collaboration. Within this network local farmers can specialize, enhancing quality and increasing their productivity. The value of every farmer's product comes in part from the completeness of the final collaborative product, the basket.
Apart from competing with agricultural verticals, this alternative helps in establishing a culture of collaboration and sustainability.
http://sites.google.com/site/multitude2008/economical-alternatives/the-food-basket
Help people all over the planet to reduce dependence on centralized and unsustainable modes of food production! Help us improve and spread the food basket idea.
# Collaborate to produce a comprehensive manual on how to set up a local food basket network; we need researchers and writers to produce this manual
# Gather free software and other logistical tools from different organizations, create a package and make it available on the Internet; we need software people for this.
# Collaborate to capture the experiences of different food basket organizations in a form of a list of short stories, containing elements of success, possible problems, etc.
Your location doesn't matter, we can collaborate through the Internet.
