FND

About

Who we are, and why Fruitful Network Development exists.

The case for coordinated local supply, and the person building toward it.

Why we exist

Northeast Ohio was once a fresh-produce powerhouse. Today that tradition survives in passionate, dispersed pockets: Harbor Gardens, Purple Brown Farm Store, Ohio City Provisions and the East Side Market, Yellow Bird Foodshed, the CWRU farms, and others. Fruitful Network Development is taking the next step: making local agriculture equitable to work in and with again.

THE VISION

The mission, plainly

Local agriculture is undercapitalized, undercoordinated, and full of people who would still rather be there than anywhere else. The first job of Fruitful Network Development is to make their day-to-day operations a little less broken: websites that work, payments that clear, mailboxes that don't get lost. The second job, open-source operations software that small operations can share without losing ownership, is what the first job pays for.

The founder

Dylan Montgomery

Dylan Montgomery

Tend to the Garden You Can Touch

- Jack Kornfield

Engineer, founder of Fruitful Network Development. Background in software, agricultural-systems research, and a lot of conversations with people working in food across Northeast Ohio. The web-services side of the business pays the bills; the open-source operations software is the long arc.

In his words

For the longer version (the background, the philosophy, and what FND is trying to build), read Dylan’s full note.

A NOTE FROM DYLAN