Founder expands Etsy-like app for farmers, gardeners, buyers

Farmish helps users buy and sell homegrown produce, eggs, garden supplies and more

RACHEL WATSON

GRAND RAPIDS — When Terra Osman launched Farmish to help hobby gardeners connect with customers, she hardly imagined having almost 200,000 users and launching a paid membership version of the app a year later.

Osman, a web developer and hobby gardener living in suburban Grand Rapids, launched Farmish on the App Store and Google Play in March 2022. Her idea for the platform arose during the pandemic when she noticed an uptick in households wanting to buy local. At the same time, millions of U.S. residents were taking up hobby gardening.

She created Farmish to bring the demographics together. The app helps users buy and sell homegrown produce, backyard chicken eggs, garden supplies, plants, trees, honey and more. They can search for items they want to purchase or sell and schedule a meetup to complete their transactions offline.

Within the first week of launch, Farmish had 1,000 users. Six months later, by September, it had 100,000 users from all over Canada and the U.S. Most live in the South, which has a longer growing season than Michigan, Osman said.

Room to grow

After participating in Spartan Innovations’ third Grand Rapids-based Conquer Accelerator co - hort for three months last year, Osman received $45,000 in funding from Red Cedar Ventures.

Spartan Innovations called Farmish the perfect fit partly because Osman’s ideas are highly scalable, and she’s teachable.

“She really checked a lot of boxes for us and for what we’re looking for (with) companies,” said Tom

Stewart, assistant director of venture acceleration with Spartan Innovations, which spun out of Michigan State University’s school of agriculture.

Rather than hiring staff with the funds, Osman contracted Holland-based software development company Collective Idea to help improve the app. As of last month, nearly 200,000 users a week were employing the platform.

Now, Osman is preparing to launch a $29-a-month or $299-a-year Market Membership that will let farmers and gardeners create public, branded storefronts, build a following, add unlimited listings and receive referral rewards. She plans to add in-app transactions and a handmade market later this spring.

“I want to do for farmers and gardeners what Etsy has done for crafters and build a path for users to go from interest to hobby to side hustle to building a business,” Osman said.