Came across this: Can Drupal Developers Come to the Aid of American Family Farmers?. The Drupal aspect might not be a necessary part of the equation, but it got me thinking.

It’s now possible to set up EBT payments so that you can pay for food online using SNAP (as part of a limited-states pilot program). However, because it’s a pretty involved process in the states where it’s available, it’s mostly just Amazon and Walmart that are offering it.

For a small farm to sell direct to consumers and accept EBT, they need a compatible POS system and USDA Food and Nutrition Service approval.

Then, if they want to also take online orders and accept EBT, they have to do major upgrades on their website (plus some more bureaucratic hoop-jumping).

Trying to locate the problem

1. Do farmers want to sell online, direct to consumers, but need help with the technology?
2. Would farmers like to accept EBT payments at their foodstands, but the technology and bureaucracy are difficult to navigate?
3. Would farmers like to accept EBT as payment online? I’m not even sure how many grocery stores outside Amazon and Walmart are doing this yet. Is there demand for it?

Possible user stories

• As a farmer, I accept EBT payments at my stand.
• As a farmer, I can sell my food online.
• As a farmer, I accept EBT payments at my online store.

I’m gonna try to hold off on proposing solutions and instead talk to some folks in order to make sure this is a real problem and if it is, better understand it.

In trying to think how I could spend open source Friday in a way that helps people affected by COVID-19, at first I looked for projects on GitHub directly related to the virus.

After some browsing, though, I decided that there are already a great number of web projects doing data modeling, tracking, mapping, and the like. Since data isn’t my main bag anyway, I decided that wasn’t the best place for me to try to help.

Local business

I know this is a big area of concern right now, so I started to think about how I could contribute. I considered putting out feelers to businesses to see if they could use (free) help getting online sales set up or something, but then I thought I should do some research first. Perhaps local businesses have already made their pain points known. If they have, I should pursue that rather than decide for myself what they do or don’t need.

Gift cards

That’s when I came across this article, whose number one suggestion was to buy gift cards. It makes a lot of sense, since it immediately boosts the business’ cashflow.

After Googling it, I found a couple sites that let people buy gift cards for local businesses, (Giftly and GiftRocket), but it seems they don’t necessarily provide the cash to the business immediately, which is the whole point in this case. So that wouldn’t really help.

What I need is a list of local businesses with URLs to a page on their website where they sell gift cards.

Getting a list

My first pass at this is going to be to explore the Google Maps API and see if I can get the data I need.

Turns out the Google Maps API isn’t free anymore. Also, there is already a good directory of local businesses, https://www.localfirst.org/member-directory. Local First also has a program that helps businesses set up gift cards, although very few seem to be using it. I have to imagine that a lot of local businesses already sell gift cards on their websites, but not all do, and of the ones that do many don’t advertise it prominently.

Summary

Okay, so I think my next steps are to look for ways to encourage the people I know to buy gift cards to their favorite local businesses, and if they don’t seem to be advertising their availability much, point out the possibility.