The Farmlink Project

The Farmlink Project is an organization of roughly 250 mostly college student volunteers working to combat food insecurity by repurposing surplus produce. To date, we’ve moved over 30 million pounds of produce from 44 states, providing roughly $2.3 million in relief to farmers and truckers during the pandemic. 

The Farmlink Project will transform the food system by coupling our grassroots volunteer movement with a digital product that connects farm-fresh produce to community organizations in real-time. Farmlink is focused on making our current food-saving process economically viable at scale by aggregating supply and demand in one easy-to-use platform. We intend to accomplish this goal by undercutting current surplus-management costs for farmers, capturing food loss at multiple points in the agricultural supply chain, and using automation to remove the logistical friction of produce sales.

The mentorship opportunities and funding provided through this opportunity would allow The Farmlink Project to continue fighting hunger while democratizing access to food through our digital product. The grant would fund immediate hunger relief in towns and cities across the country, facilitate the development of our digital food rescue tool, and foster the personal and professional growth of the student leaders behind our work.

I fell backward into agricultural work.

I’m a student at Brown studying applied math and joined the founding team of The Farmlink Project to build an animated widget on the website. I became interested in the organization’s food-moving operations, though, and took a leadership role on our logistics team. Following the end of the spring 2020 semester, I decided to take a gap year and build Farmlink full-time. Throughout the summer, I designed logistics protocols to facilitate Farmlink’s produce deliveries. In the fall, I built out a research and development team focused on pursuing “moonshot” ideas to make Farmlink more effective and innovative. In the spring of 2021, in pursuing one of these moonshot ideas, I have been a project manager for a team focused on designing a sustainable business model and software solution to automate, streamline, and scale Farmlink’s current operations. As PM, I wear managerial, technical, and business development hats; it’s been a challenging few months leading agile product development, and this work has inspired me to pursue further projects in agricultural technology solutions (agtech) after I graduate from college. 

I’m excited to continue to fight climate change and make healthy food more accessible in the future.

In April 2020, I and a group of my peers from Stanford and Brown University founded The Farmlink Project. We are a nonprofit fighting food insecurity by rescuing surplus produce and delivering it to various food relief organizations. 

Food insecurity affects roughly 2 billion people globally. And yet, 30-40% of the global food supply is wasted annually. As a student-founded, student-run organization, our operational agility has allowed us to rescue over 31,000,000 pounds of produce and serve approximately 26,000,000 meals to 328 food relief organizations across the US in 13 months. 

We’re building an operational process and software product that mitigates food loss at the point of sale, the most difficult moment for rerouting. By designing for "rejected loads" first, we are able to generalize our operational process to handle surplus generated further upstream. Around $1.7 billion goes unclaimed in federal tax deductions yearly in this space; though our average commission will likely be <1%, we can expect revenue from this strategy to be almost double that which we raised through donations in our first year in operation. Our service will be streamlined, scalable, and accessible through a digital platform and is about to revolutionize this industry.

The food space is hot right now. We’re not alone in trying to reimagine the food system to fight climate change and feed people. And that’s a good thing: we need a bunch of smart people chipping away at this problem to make systemic change. Many food rescue organizations focus on the downstream portion of the supply chain after food has reached grocery store shelves. The Farmlink Project, on the other hand, targets upstream food loss. Our primary partners include farmers, agricultural commissions, processors, packing sheds, warehouse managers, and other institutions that take part in growing and preparing produce before it hits the shelves. 

Currently, we provide a food-moving service to our supplier partners and food donation to our demand-side partners. In the next phase of our growth, our product will facilitate the logistics of produce donations and sales, aggregate and display environmental social good metrics associated with an organization’s history using our product, and keep track of necessary documentation. We will be a "one-stop-shop" for surplus produce throughout the agricultural supply chain, able to reroute excess generated by various food system stakeholders to community feeding groups in an efficient, scalable, and agile manner.

This organization, and my work directly, has and will continue to impact millions of people across the United States. We’re operating on a massive scale, moving millions of pounds of produce and serving millions of meals, directly impacting the amount of available produce at food relief organizations across America.  

Hunger is an incredibly important humanitarian issue. It affects 1 in 4 American families, over 2 billion people globally, can cause premature health risks and chronic disease, stifle child growth and cause psychological trauma. Yet, there is enough food on the planet to feed every last person. 

As an organization, The Farmlink Project is attempting to end hunger and food waste simultaneously. We are incredibly humbled to have the opportunity to do this work and understand the limitations of our knowledge on this issue. However, we recognize that hunger can be an issue of life or death and warrants immediate mitigation.