markfussell / eggs

eggs is a tool for small farms to help manage their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs

Eggs

Eggs is a tool to help small meat farms manage their community supported agriculture programs (CSAs).

Who is it for?

It was built especially for CSAs which:

• Have centralized pickups (rather than direct deliveries to customers)
• Accept orders for products which only have an estimated price until they are weighed (such as chickens and cuts of beef)
• Let members “top up” and carry a balance from month to month, from which their final order total is deducted after weighing.
• Don’t require a monthly commitment

It is not so good for CSAs or farms which:

• Have a single flat-rate product, such as a fruit or veggie box
• Need automatically recurring billing or orders
• Require a monthly commitment

Some Features:

Members of a CSA can:

• Join a CSA for a specific farm
• Submit an order for any open delivery
• Edit or cancel their order up until the delivery closes for orders
• View their balance and any previous transactions
• Receive a customized email once their order is finalized (weighed and priced) with the final total and any amount due.

Managers of a CSA can:

• Manage members
• Enter transactions for a member’s balance (debits/credits)
• Manage products which the farm offers
• Create a delivery with available inventory (total available and per-person maximums)
• Define available pickup locations
• Accept orders and view inventory status
• Print bag/box labels and packing lists for farm use
• Export delivery data
• Email members

Status

Eggs has been rolled out to two farms on EggBasket (http://eggbasket.org/), hosted on Heroku.

All features have been built specifically for those two farms – a more general use case will require some tweaking, at the very least.

Contact me with questions of any sort: [email protected]

It’s released under the MIT license, so use freely!

Thanks

• Bonnie Powell, the intrepid manager of Soul Food Farm and Clark Summit Farm CSA programs, who inspired and guided the project.
• Alon Salant, for much mentoring and help with importing
• Arena Reed, for some early UI sketching and brainstorming
• Sarah Allen, for teaching me this stuff in the first place!