Digital online marketplaces for farmers continue to grow post-pandemic

Ms Davey was awarded the honour for her innovation in setting up Grown Not Flown, a digital platform that connects florists, retailers and others with local flower farmers.

She is now expanding into offering farmers the opportunity to sell produce, partly influenced by her experience growing truffles on her property along with her flowers and small-scale beef operation.

"When we started to take over our family farm through succession... we wanted to take the farm in a new direction and actually started with truffles," she said.

"It was a long-term investment for the property, with two years of soil work before the first tree went in the ground.

"You don't expect to start to produce truffles for about three to five years, and then they don't sort of tend to hit maturity until around 10 to 15 years."

Ms Davey said she foresaw the same challenges in finding buyers for her truffles when there was a potential for inconsistent supply.

She said Grown Not Flown was a digital platform that allowed flexibility for the farmer based on the availability of their produce.

"We've got a particular focus on the micro and small-scale growers and producers in particular," she said.

"We won't have the amount to go into those wholesale markets as such, but we might be looking to sell to florists, floral designers but chefs and restaurants as well."

Ms Davey said the platform for food producers was "very much in its infancy", and she plans to onboard more producers in 2024.

However, plans to host online workshops for farmers and a newly launched podcast show there are more big ideas to help connect small-scale producers even more.

Ultimately, Ms Davey said one primary goal is to allow micro and small-scale growers easy accessibility to an online presence.

"A lot of the time, technology is a real barrier to being able to get a digital presence as a small scale producer," she said.

"If you're just getting started, digital platforms like ours are a way for farmers to do their business with a small amount of effort or money into technology.

"You can essentially set up an account and start selling in less than five minutes on the Grown Not Flown platform."

She isn't alone in seeing the opportunities of the digital marketplace for farmers as new software platforms and networks continue to launch or expand post-COVID.

One is Refresh: Food, a new digital marketplace app for growers with excess fruit and vegetables due to either bumper crops or imperfections.

The new app's primary aim is to help reduce food waste in the supply chain, with profits invested into supporting charities like Foodbank, OzHarvest and Fareshare.

Refresh: Food managing director Chris Cramond said it aimed to combine "sustainability with commercial purpose".

"We want to help broaden growers' network of potential buyers to tap into demand that they wouldn't otherwise have visibility of," he said.

"We've had great feedback from our test users.

"It's only early days, and we're expecting to see more buyers and sellers come onboard in the next few months which will help fuel our marketplace supply and demand."

The not-for-profit open-source online software platform Open Food Network has also recently launched a set of tools to help streamline workflow for farmers.

Their new "Open Food Ecosystem" offers many dashboards for admin tasks like updating product listings and keeping track of product history.

The network has also delved into undertaking research that assists small-scale farmers.

Earlier this year, the network released a report showing that longer-term leases, legal guidance, and matchmaking mechanisms can make access to land easier for new farmers.