SOUTHWEST MICHIGAN · NORTHWEST INDIANA · 90 MINUTES TO CHICAGO
A free sell sheet any farm can download, fill in and publish — varieties, weights, prices, photos, phone number. Buyers order straight from the grower. No commission, no account, no middleman.
Ninety minutes separates some of the best growing ground in the country from one of the biggest food markets in the country, and almost nothing crosses that gap. A grower plants in April, guesses at demand, and finds out in September whether the guess was right. What does not sell goes to an auction floor at whatever the room pays that morning, or it rots in the row.
The buyers exist. Sauce makers, canners, co-packers, chefs and processors all want named-origin produce, and most of them cannot name a single farm within two hours of their kitchen. The demand is real, the supply is real, and there is no wire between them.
Everything on this table already exists. Only the road to the buyer is missing.
Every one is a single file with no server, no build step and no dependency on anything that can be switched off.
If you can edit a recipe card, you can do this. The whole sheet is one file, and the part you change is plain English near the bottom.
$0
No paid tier, no commission, no transaction fee, no listing fee, no exclusivity and no contract. This is not a trial.
The files are public domain under CC0. Copy them, change them, rename them, run your own region, compete with this one. That is the point. A bridge only one person can maintain is not a bridge — it is a toll booth waiting to happen.
First Pick takes nothing out of any sale. There is no revenue model underneath this and no investor waiting to switch one on. It exists because the gap between a Michigan field and a Chicago kitchen should not be this hard to cross.
The only real cost is keeping the lights on — a domain, hosting, and the work of adding the next region. If a sheet earned you an order you would not otherwise have had, chipping in keeps it free for the farm after you.
If you want the money to do more good, send it past us. Some growers in the directory take direct support — a tip jar, a prepaid share, a fund after a hailstorm takes a season out. A dollar to a farm goes further than a dollar to a server.
Selling this week's picking is triage. The real fix is a buyer who commits in February so the farm plants to a real order instead of a guess — guaranteed volume, locked price, harvested to the buyer's window. No spoilage, no scramble, nothing left over, and a floor under the grower before a dollar goes into seed.
The sell sheet has that request built in. Every buyer who opens one is a click away from asking for it. That is the bridge. Everything else is scaffolding.