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'Square Harvest' Farm-to-Home Delivery Service Earns Honor
Wisconsin Ag Connection - 08/26/2016

A startup company that allows consumers order exactly what they need from small, local farms and food producers has earned the top Wisconsin Innovation Award for agriculture. The owners of Square Harvest says their goal is to marry computer technology with the timeless traditions of small-farm farming and small-batch food production.

The service often has the online orders delivered within 48 hours, according to co-founder Madhavi Krishnan, who's worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Computer Sciences and medical software company Epic Systems. He says once orders are received, company software sorts them and notifies suppliers. On Saturday morning, orders are packed and routed to consumers at a facility on the north side of Madison.

"The result is what we think of as a CSA on steroids," says Krishnan. "A CSA may supply 30 percent of a family's daily food, but for a large number of customers, we can provide close to 100 percent: milk, eggs, meat, jams, even bread. We allow you to eat basically local all the time."

The Square Harvest idea has transcontinental roots, starting with the founder's memories of shopping with local farmers in Chennai, India. A second root came from Krishnan's work developing software at Epic.

"Doctors hate change and the software has to work around them, and it's the same with farmers," he notes. "Technology is not what they do; they want to do farming. When the technology works, it makes their job easier, by doing things they may not enjoy: marketing and reaching customers."

A third root traces to a 2014 sabbatical by co-founder and spouse Karu Sankaralingam, an associate professor of computer science at UW-Madison.

"There was this thing called the cloud that was taking over my field, and I knew it would impact hardware, software and everything," Sankaralingam said. "The cloud allows you to connect farmers through a single link to consumers through software, without worrying about hardware."

The tech duo says they can provide close to 100 percent of a family's daily food. Though delivery sounds energy-intensive, it benefits from software that solves the traveling salesman problem, which finds the shortest route between any assemblage of addresses.


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