Louisiana’s agriculture and seafood industries will soon have a new Web portal with which to push their wares. It’s called MarketMaker, and it should be up and operational on the Internet sometime in early 2010. During a presentation to the Baton Rouge Press Club today, LSU AgCenter Vice Chancellor Paul Coreil says the site would function like an online farmers’ market. “The service will help producers find a market anywhere in the country for their products,” Coreil says. “This raises our agriculture marketing efforts to the next level. This will be a huge boost for our rural economy.”
MarketMaker was originally developed by the University of Illinois and is already in use in 12 states. Arkansas and Florida join Louisiana as upstarts looking to go online within the next year. About $125,000 in federal recovery funds will be used to purchase the software, develop it and keep the site going for three years. After that, the Louisiana Farm Bureau and state departments of agriculture and fisheries have committed to sustaining the program. The service will be free to both buyers and sellers.
The concept is simple enough: farmers and fishermen will be able to enter their contact information and their products, including sizes and varieties. Consumers, restaurants, chefs, wholesalers and others will then be able to search Louisiana MarketMaker for what they want and the free enterprise system takes over from there. For the full version of this story, click here.—Jeremy Alford
