Half A Cow
A short history and a brief roadmap for farmers and customers to see where we are planning to go, and where we’ve come from!
For a few years we've been purchasing our beef direct from our local farmer. I had always acted as the go-between for myself and my family as none of us needed an entire cow.
I explained to my farmer friend that she could probably charge more, and sell to more people if she had a website, but there were too many challenges including finding customers, selling "whole" cows, and answering all the questions!

Not long after sigificant areas of the Adelaide Hills community was devastated by fires. Forget trying to sell anything or do anything clever, most people around here were just trying to survive.Â
Fortunately my personal farm was not effected, but many others were, and continue to rebuild to this day.Â
2020 was a challenge for my other business (and main source of income) so working on a website with no gaurantee of success was shelved.Â
Stuff it...
After a long time of "Half a Cow" kicking around in my head I decide to make it happen yet again!

While the public couldn't see much, the team was hard at work building and testing the features to make half a cow as easy as possible for farmers to add their farms and products to our online marketplace
After posting on a few groups, I messaged a reporter who's looking for stories on "cost of living" and she agrees to come up to the farm and put halfacow.farm on TV!
"It's not actually finished yet"Â - I saidÂ
"Don't worry - it's a great idea, just make it work ASAP" - Most people I talk to.
What happens next, I don't know but this is what we've got planned
Half a Cow Online PTY LTD should be ready for public launch mid July 2022.Â
We'll be reaching out to beef farmers and verifying them, and onboarding them about 2 weeks before launch.Â
The plan is to launch initially in South Australia only, and only for Beef

After a successful launch in SA with a chance to work through any teething / start up issues we'll be expanding to help farmers in other parts of Australia.Â

After we're happy that we've got cows sorted, we'll expand the system to help sheep, goat, deer and pig farmers to sell through our platform.Â
Each animal has slightly different requirements, pricing, timelines and meat cuts so we can't it well, all at once.Â

Some people just want steaks, not mince or you know.. half a cow.
Unfortunately it's quite difficult for a small scale farmer to supply 'choice cuts' of meat in boxes all year long.Â
As the website matures, and farmers grow, we'll be adding additional features and services to help farmers tailor their products and increase their value. This might mean multiple farms collaborating behind the scenes, or larger players coming into the market.Â
Time will tell.