The Amish-run Chautauqua (CPA) and Genesee Valley (GVPA) Produce Auctions serve 120+ small specialty crop producers from 9 counties. Despite being key markets, both auctions struggled to achieve their financial and marketing risk comprehension goals due to a lack of culturally-appropriate record-keeping and business analysis tools.
Building on existing practices, this project co-developed improved recordkeeping processes with auction staff and provided resources & training that aligned with staff time constraints and skillsets, plus created culturally-relevant sales analysis techniques. This work reduced the auctions’ financial risk, enabled marketing risk characterization, gave growers actionable information, and enhanced buyer feedback mechanisms.
Eleven auction staff gained new record-keeping and data analysis skills. One auction completely redesigned their sales processing protocol in response to project recommendations resulting in error reductions of 8X for market price and 7X for sales volume reports and improved customer complaint resolution ability. In August 2022, the other auction adopted a newly permitted technology (word processing machine) to conduct some data management and tabulation tasks. This will greatly reduce analysis labor and improve accuracy over the by-hand methods that were the project's focus.
About 135 growers learned marketing opportunities from this project. At least 26 made changes to realize economic benefits.