After the announcement of the launch of the partnership between Escrow.com and the farmer to farmer transaction platform, ONFARM, Australian Rural & Regional News found out a bit more about this new e-commerce and social media venture from ONFARM’s co-founders, Melinda and George King.
ARR.News: What was the genesis for the idea of ONFARM?
Melinda and George King: ONFARM was developed in response to finding a way that all industry stakeholders could address many of the pain points we experience across agriculture. It was about developing a platform that could give farmers access to their own network on every level and equip them with all the trading and communication tools needed to create and trade the way they want in a safe and secure way.
ARR.News: ONFARM appears to be part of a global network, is that correct? If so, can you tell us about that?
Melinda and George King: ONFARM offers users the functionality to interact with it both locally or globally. There are many control settings for users to define how they would like to create or engage with any service or feature. Its powers of connection are able to group farmers into collaboratives of their producer type at a local, state, national and global level, which effectively creates a network of many types and at many levels across the entire agricultural industry. Within each collaborative or community there is also the ability to create a multi vendor market place making it a central hub for farmers to meet and trade.
ARR.News: How do you see ONFARM as being different from AuctionsPlus or Gumtree or other online venues for farm and related products?
Melinda and George King: ONFARM is an all-in-one community trading and engagement platform for people to trade and share in the work they do on farm. It seeks to be all inclusive as opposed to the current agents only Auctions Plus model and offers greater choice in how people want to trade using different selling formats and payment flows that provide greater buyer and seller protection than mainstream social.
ARR.News: Is it that you do not charge commissions on sales of livestock and grain? How do you earn revenue from such transactions – advertising? & How do ONFARM transaction fees work, as they seem to be based on the dollar value of a transaction?
Melinda and George King: The financial modelling has been built around a flat transaction fee for items sold in the marketplace. This ranges from a fee of $0.11 for a sale amount up to $10 and incrementally increases to a maximum flat fee of $110 for all items sold above $5000. For example if 50 head of cattle were sold at auction for $2,000 per head with a total sale value of $100,000, a transaction fee of $110 would apply.
ARR.News: Do you charge for listings in the Market and Jobs sections of ONFARM?
Melinda and George King: The Job Board and Resume listings are free. It’s free to list for the following selling formats: Auction Events, Auctions, Flash Sale, Buy Now & Store listings.
ARR.News: Who conducts the assessments for the Livestock Assessment Portal?
Melinda and George King: People can choose to self asses and this will be marked as Vendor Assessed or sellers can choose to have their Stock Agent or Assessor perform and enter the livestock assessment.
ARR.News: Who are the Platinum Primary Producers who seeded ONFARM?
Melinda and George King: The pain points the ONFARM platform can now address through its functionality were collectively identified and discussed across a broad range of industry stakeholders over many years from many different sources, one of which was the Platinum Primary Producer participants. We like to think that it was seeded from the inspiration and minds of many, being the industry itself who have experienced the same wishes and frustrations.
ARR.News: What is the relationship of the Platinum Primary Producers to the private equity group funding ONFARM?
Melinda and George King: There is no formal or legal relationship between PPP and ONFARM. The private equity group is made up of people and associated entities who also happen to be members of PPP.
ARR.News: How many people do you expect will be involved with managing ONFARM?
Melinda and George King: This is an unknown quantity at present, however ONFARM will remain responsive to the needs, improvements and demands of the agricultural community.
ARR.News: Have you had responses to ONFARM from the farming industry bodies?
Melinda and George King: Many of the communication consultants from the farming industry bodies remain reluctant to change the status quo from the traditional way they represent and communicate with farmers.
ONFARM is an opportunity to open up real effective collaboration between its members, the operational staff and the elected board. This has been a key issue raised with our industry bodies and the wider industry.
In 2017, a health check of the blueprint for Australian Agriculture was conducted and voted by the attendees of the Agribusiness Australia CEO Forum.
On the question of does the farm sector speak with a clear, consistent voice on key issues, using appropriate technologies and mediums to reach audiences, 90% either disagreed (40%) or strongly disagreed (50%).
While they remain tentative to open up to this idea, we remain hopeful that it will become the way of the future and they will get on board with this all-in-one community engagement platform that has been created for and dedicated to the agricultural industry.
You can learn more about what is available inside a community or business structure here: https://onfarm.lpages.co/sample-community/
ARR.News: There are a lot of sections in the Dashboard not directly necessary for the exchange platform. Further, there are already many farming industry bodies and related groups, and news providers covering farming matters for instance. And of course there is Facebook. Is it really necessary? How will quality standards be maintained? Who will be managing the social platform?
Melinda and George King: ONFARM is not an industry body, related group or news provider. It is there to enable, aggregate and facilitate all the great work that is being done across the entire industry by feeding it all into a central hub dedicated to agriculture.
It’s a meeting and marketplace for all stakeholders to come together. When you join ONFARM, the powers of connection can place farmers into collaboratives where they can meet to discuss and formulate real world solutions to address issues affecting their business, sector and the broader agricultural industry at a state, national and global level.
It’s an opportunity to establish an organic grassroots body of farmers that now have the functionality to gather a collection of voices, ideas and votes on the things that matter to them. Farmers now have the means to muster their mob and stand strong together on many levels.
It’s also about giving farmers choice in how they trade while offering secure payment alternatives to the Facebook and gumtree options.
The platform has many mechanisms in place to ensure standards are maintained including self regulation through customer reviews, an open Q&A service on every item, moderators in forums as well as a reporting function on every post to flag inappropriate content, abuse or spam.
From a management perspective we have access to a dispute resolution function within the platform, an integration with a KYC identity verification provider, a comprehensive end user license agreement and a due diligence team to verify registration numbers for livestock transfers and businesses.
ARR.News: Is the social section separate to the exchange platform?
Melinda and George King: The Social Space and Market Place are separate functions within the ONFARM platform. There is the ability to share and promote market place items in the social space. The individual user, business and community structure can all create and control their own market place privacy settings.
ARR.News: What privacy protections are in place to protect the information of people that use the exchange platform and those that use the social section?
Melinda and George King: These are privacy protection measures implemented on the platform:
- Data encryption: Personal data is encrypted while being transferred, using the SSL protocol;
- Data is secured: Data is stored and secured on an industry-standard platform (Amazon Web Services);
- Account protection: Passwords are stored encrypted in databases. Users can turn on two-factor authentication to better protect their accounts;
- Minimum shared information: Personal data is only shared with other parties such as other members, groups, or vendors when needed. Data is not shared to external sources;
- Personal data removal: Users can have their data removed using the Delete Account function;
- Platform maintenance: The application platform is continuously monitored and updated to prevent attacks.
About the Kings
George King is a 7th generation cattle producer and together with Melinda they operate a large scale commercial Angus breeding operation in the Central West of NSW. They have been using the principles of regenerative agriculture over the last 25 years to improve the landscape and ecosystems they work with, to create a symbiotic relationship around all elements and processes involved in producing the best quality of food with the best outcome for the environment.
Related story: Escrow.com partners with Australian farmer network ONFARM
