We’re happy to announce that we’ve chosen a new website for our CSA shares called GrownBy and we think you’ll really love it. GrownBy has features very similar to Harvie and some new ones too. We’ll go over a few of the most important features today and why we chose GrownBy.
We know you’ve really loved some of Harvie’s features over the years but there were also some pain points. We know that customization and the ability to reschedule your share were really well loved and utilized so we knew that our new CSA software needed to have both. We also know that customizing multiple shares was really confusing.
Customization in GrownBy
GrownBy allows you to customize your share by allocating a credit to your account each week and allowing you to select produce from our weekly list to fill your share. This is a bit of a change from Harvie where a share was automatically generated for you. We’re planning to send a suggested share list along with a recipe and/or cooking suggestion that you can use to fill your share as a helping hand and starting point.
Reschedule/Vacation
The language here is a little different but the end result is the same: if you’re going to miss a share pickup due to a vacation/wedding/work trip/etc you can still get the value of that share at a different time. GrownBy has a feature called “Vacation Weeks” where if you know you’ll be out of town a certain week you can claim a vacation week in GrownBy. Then, GrownBy adds a credit to your account for the value of the share that week.
Mobile App!
We’re really excited that GrownBy has a mobile app and that it works well and looks great! We know Harvie only kind of worked on mobile devices and that many people used a computer to customize your share. We think the mobile app will make it easier for you to interact with your CSA share each week.
Why we chose GrownBy
We chose GrownBy because it has the ability to offer customized shares and GrownBy allows you to reschedule shares through the Vacation Weeks feature noted above. Another reason we chose GrownBy over others is that its business model is a cooperative and very similar to how the Saint Peter Food Co-op is operated. GrownBy is farmer owned and is democratically governed by a board of directors. Each farmer-owner gets a vote so farmers have more control over the direction of GrownBy. We think that’s really neat.
To Conclude
2024 marks a year of significant change for our farm and our CSA program. We’re excited about GrownBy - we really think you’ll love it and we’re looking forward to our 2025 season already. We’ll be sending instructions on how to renew your share to 2025 next week. Stay tuned!
P.s. - Want to sign up for our 2025 Vegetable Share right now?! Check out our store here and don’t forget to enter the code ‘BYEHARVIE’ at checkout to save 5%
