Black Squirrel Farms and Yates County Farm Bureau had a clear problem. Farm families across New York held valuable genetic material in their native nut trees, walnut, hickory, and pecan, standing in yards and field edges. Seed buyers needed regionally-adapted genetic stock. But no marketplace connected them.
The barrier wasn’t just awareness. It was the complete absence of infrastructure to make decentralized supply visible to specialized buyers.
Diagnosing the Real Problem
The 2024/2025 project “Identifying and Collecting Seed from Genetically Superior Walnut, Hickory and Pecan Trees on Yates County, New York Farms” evaluated 40+ trees across 25+ farm families. The team collected over 1,700 pounds of raw seed across two seasons, a substantial volume from a single county.
But scaling beyond project boundaries required solving two distinct problems:
The first problem demanded technical infrastructure, that’s where we came in. Our Sci helped evaluate existing open source tools and identify a platform that could be configured to Black Squirrel Farm’s requirements.
Building the Solution: Technical Architecture
When Sara Tyler from Black Squirrel Farms first approached Our Sci, she mentioned the possibility of building a custom dashboard for the project. It was a reasonable request as custom builds offer maximum control and can be tailored precisely to unique requirements, but Our Sci’s approach prioritizes existing solutions before building new ones. The team evaluated multiple open-source platforms:
Each platform had distinct strengths. Hylo excelled at community engagement. FarmOS provided comprehensive farm data management. A custom dashboard built on SurveyStack would offer maximum flexibility. But these didn’t provide the complete combination needed: geographic mapping, product discovery, producer profiles, and the ability to function as a marketplace without processing financial transactions.
The OFN Decision: Configuration Over Custom Development
Our Sci selected Open Food Network (OFN) as the ideal tool. The selection of OFN was strategic and it provided three critical capabilities:
The technical challenge was onboarding. How do you collect standardized information from producers with varying technical comfort levels and create georeferenced profiles without requiring them to learn a new platform?
We solved this by integrating SurveyStack, our open-source survey platform, as the onboarding mechanism. Folks with nut trees complete the survey and we create their OFN producer profile with enterprise details, location data, contact information, and product listings.
The survey approach offers several advantages:
How It Works in Practice
Producer profiles on the Northeast Nutweb are highly customizable. Growers control what information they share, from minimal contact details to extensive enterprise descriptions with custom imagery. Product listings span three categories: nuts (seed stock), nut products (processed goods), and tree seedlings.
Critically, the platform functions as a discovery tool rather than a transaction processor. Buyers browse the geographic map, evaluate available products based on producer-supplied information, and initiate direct contact. This design choice respects the complexity of seed transactions, where quality assessment, regulatory requirements, and relationship-building happen through conversation.
The Replicable Pattern
This project demonstrates a common pattern in agricultural data infrastructure. The tools to connect decentralized supply with specialized demand often don’t exist because the market appears too small or specialist to justify platform development, but aggregated across regions or product categories, the opportunity is substantial!
This project’s approach offers a framework:
The Northeast Nutweb will remain live and fully supported by Black Squirrel Farms beyond the project’s March 2026 funding conclusion. Black Squirrel Farms will continue managing producer onboarding, with the platform’s value increasing as more growers participate.
The current manual onboarding process serves a strategic purpose. By handling producer questions and workflow challenges directly, Black Squirrel Farms is documenting real-world pain points and requirements. This learning phase will inform any future software integrations to autopopulate OFN profiles from SurveyStack surveys, ensuring technical investments address actual needs rather than assumed ones. It’s another example of building solutions around observed patterns rather than predicted behaviors.
Beyond Tree Seeds
While built for native nut tree seeds, the infrastructure solves a broader challenge in that any agricultural product with dispersed small-scale supply and specialized buyer requirements faces similar market opacity. The technical solution, an open-source hub with survey-based onboarding, adapts to different commodities and regions.
Organizations managing distributed agricultural supply chains, from specialty crops to regenerative beef, face parallel challenges. Building transparent, low-barrier marketplaces that respect producer autonomy while providing buyer discovery tools requires intentional technical architecture.
Our Sci specializes in building these data systems. The Northeast Nutweb is one implementation of a replicable model for making invisible supply chains visible.
This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture through the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program.
