Dear reader,

We recently celebrated seven years of CrowdFarming, the same age as my eldest daughter, Sofia. 

In these seven years, full of lessons learnt, we’ve become the main sales channel for organic farmers in Europe. We started out with a simple website where farmers could create a profile and sell their crops by having their trees adopted or by selling individual boxes.

Over time, we’ve expanded our services and now, aside from the website, we help our farmers with logistics and also with implementing organic and regenerative farming practices in their fields. The direct sales channel is a lever for more and more farmers to be encouraged to grow organically, ensuring a sale price to absorb the costs of cultivation.

Reflecting on the successes and learnings of 2024, I can see that direct selling isn’t just about avoiding intermediaries, but also about having the chance to generate consumer awareness. When a consumer buys something at a supermarket, they only see good things dressed up by a style of marketing that is truly disconnected from the agricultural reality. When a consumer buys directly from the farmer, they can better understand what they’re paying for and that the fruit doesn’t have to look perfect to taste good.

Here’s a summary of the main successes, failures, and learnings of 2024:

• (Positive) 47 new farmers signed up and more than 95% of those already with us renewed their membership. In total, there are already more than 330 farmers selling their crops without intermediaries, with more than 32% being young farmers.
• (Positive) We’ve received the results of the first twelve farmers who signed up to our regenerative agriculture programme and, on average, they have improved the metrics that indicate the health of their ecosystems (soil, water, and biodiversity) by 25%.
• (Negative) In the summer, an early-stage fungus invisible to the human eye caused 4.5% of the orders delivered in those months to experience some kind of incident, with stone fruit being the most affected. We returned more than €160,000 to affected customers, but what hurt us most was losing the trust of those consumers who had placed an order for the first time and haven’t ordered again.
• (Positive) Thanks to donations from CrowdGiving, we sent 17,844 kg of food to the people impacted by the terrible floods in Valencia.
• (Positive) We’re the leading European farmer community in terms of direct sales. We’ve boosted sales by 35% this year, we have 475,000 active users, and we’ve broken the barrier of two million orders delivered.
• (Negative) Our main suppliers (transport and advertising companies) have again hiked up prices, making it difficult for us to achieve a profit this year. We’ve lost €3m this year because we want to keep on offering competitive prices.
• (Positive) Despite this, we’re on our way to reaching a critical mass of orders that will help us generate economies of scale and become a financially sustainable business. Although we had losses during the year, November and December were months with positive results.
• (Positive) The subscription to our mixed box of seasonal organic fruit with products from several farmers already has more than 35,000 subscribers, making it the best-selling box for European organic farmers.
  
  

Happy harvesting for 2025!

Gonzalo Úrculo, Farmer & Co-Founder of CrowdFarming