Connecting Growers & Markets

Platform Tool Reduces Food Waste & Increases Farmer Profitability

Fresh produce is highly perishable, consumer demand varies and growers often harvest the same crops at the same time. Furthermore, extensive distribution chains create waste and lower profits. On average growers generally receive a small fraction of a dollar spent on produce by the consumer. Dr. J. Rene Villalobos aims to increase grower profits by 20-30%.

To address these challenges, Villalobos and his research team build tools that help fruit and vegetable growers diversify harvests, capitalize on market opportunities and ensure that farming remains an attractive career choice and provides a living wage. The research team ultimately developed a prototype platform, TERRa-Fresh, that provides farmers with coordination tools to predict and efficiently meet consumer demand. These tools further reduce food waste and increase farmer profits.

Details about this breakthrough

Through this grant, Villalobos and his team partnered with academic researchers, small businesses and grassroots organizations in Arizona and New Mexico. This unique partnership established a platform for efficient, rapid-response supply chains that enable small growers to service a significantly higher portion of the market for fresh produce.

The platform identifies market opportunities and helps growers diversify crops by providing specific planting schedules to capture different markets.

• The platform’s market intelligence and planning tools help small farmers reach markets at the right time with the right product, reducing food waste;
• Automated logistics coordination and negotiation tools allow small farmers to operate efficiently; and
• This research is delivering a roadmap to help small farmers participate in direct-to-consumer produce channels such as Amazon Fresh, Instacart or Walmart Grocery.

Impact

Villalobos and the research team shared the results in several ways to engage numerous stakeholders. This outreach included hosting community-wide training workshops, engaging with social and print media and publishing several peer-reviewed articles.

In conducting this research, Villalobos uncovered other logistical challenges that produce growers face in getting their products to markets. Specifically, produce growers face first-mile problems, meaning they struggle to secure refrigerated transport for their harvests. Often their harvests are small and securing a commercial refrigerated truck for a smaller harvest is prohibitively expensive. Growers are also concerned about potential contamination if multiple harvests are combined in a single truck and some growers live in rural areas that commercial trucks do not service.

Building on their FFAR-funded research, Villalobos developed a concept for aggregating multiple harvests in separate refrigerated cubes, called Mini-Containers. The integrated storage transportation system aggregates Mini-Containers, which are stackable, insulated containers, powered by traditional as well as solar-based sources, that create controlled environments to extend the shelf-life of perishable products. The Mini-Containers can be delivered before or during harvests and refrigerate the produce until a truck that collects multiple containers can transport them to the intended market. Due to Villalobos’ outcomes from the FFAR funded research, the City of Phoenix provided Villalobos $95,000 to build a Mini-Container protype. The research team then received a $250,000 National Science Foundation grant to improve the central refrigeration unit used to efficiently maintain the Mini-Containers at the right temperature.

Fresh Cubes can refrigerate produce without a power source for about six hours. The research team invented a portable solar farm, which they are currently patenting, to power refrigerators postharvest in rural areas for longer.

Villalobos noted that there is considerable interest in continuing and expanding the research.