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This is wonderful!

The Networked Future of Farms

. . . a Bay Area startup has launched a service to make it easier and cheaper for restaurants to buy food from small, local farms. With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and on farms, FarmsReach wants to create an online food marketplace that would directly connect farms with restaurants.

“The food supply industry is ripe for ‘disintermediation’ because of the internet,” said Alistair Croll, a startup consultant working with FarmsReach. In other words, middlemen beware: Food could undergo a transition like the one that swept through classified ads, air travel and dozens of other industries.

*snip*

The current distribution of edibles works the way it does, though, because it’s brutally effective at reliably delivering low-cost food all over the country. Sysco, the dominant $13 billion American food distributor, works and restaurants know that . . . "Chefs order from Sysco because they know, no matter what, they’ll get their orders or there is an account rep they can strangle.” . . . [today] restaurants have two basic options. Call up a dozen local farms to order the ingredients for their salads or use Sysco’s online system and have everything show up, come hell or high water. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only the pickiest chefs at the fancier restaurants choose the local farm route.

FarmsReach wants to make ordering from local, small farms as easy and reliable as ordering from Sysco.

*snip*

If the Internet stopped developing now, disruptive innovations like this would probably echo down through history for a few dozen more years. But do we have that long?