A Hudson Valley farmer and longtime agricultural advocate built a cooperatively owned app to give small farms a fighting chance in the digital marketplace.
On a bright April morning, Lindsey Lusher Shute is home at Hearty Roots Community Farm in Clermont, watching her crew put seeds in the ground. It's planting season, the busiest time of year in American agriculture, and for GrownBy, the farmer-owned software platform she co-founded as part of Farm Generations Cooperative.
GrownBy is built to be a one-stop farm operations platform: CSA management, online sales, market pre-orders, delivery scheduling, and customer communications, all under one roof. There's no upfront cost or subscription fee and farmers pay a small transaction fee only when a sale occurs. Farm Generations, the cooperative that developed GrownBy, has a straightforward mission: to build technology that is fairly priced, cooperatively owned, and built in the interests of the farmers who use it.
"Right now, this is our busiest month, helping farms get set up for the 2026 season," Lusher Shute says. "When you have more sales coming through a platform, or you're new, getting your first share week in order is really important."
Lusher Shute and her husband Ben Shute started Hearty Roots in Clermont and co-founded the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) around 2009. She led NYFC as executive director for a decade, growing it from a handful of volunteers to a nationwide network of 40 chapters in 28 states. Her team lobbied on multiple farm bills, ran state campaigns that changed law (including New York's Working Farms Protection Act in 2018, which requires state funding for farmland conservation easements) and convinced the USDA to launch a micro-lending program for small and beginning farmers.
"Some of the finance tools that we were able to get mobilized at the federal level made it possible for many farms to get started that otherwise would not have had that opportunity, because the USDA just literally would not lend to them," she says.
After passing the baton at NYFC, she turned her attention to an emerging problem: farmers were being dragged into a digital future they had no stake in.
As venture-backed tech companies moved into the farm-to-consumer space, Lusher Shute saw the same extractive logic at work: farmers bring the product and the customer relationships, the platform owns the data and captures the value.
"We embarked on a project of creating farm technology that was actually fair, that was cooperatively owned," she says.
Farm Generations Cooperative was established around 2017 by Lusher Shute and longtime colleague Michael Parker. Its product, GrownBy, launched for the 2020 growing season, right into the pandemic, which proved the point about digital farm sales when grocery supply chains buckled and local farms with direct-sales infrastructure stepped in. The GrownBy waitlist hit 400 farms by fall 2020. Version 1.0 was completed in 2021.
Today the platform has over 1,100 registered farms across the US and Canada. The co-op is structured with 90 percent farmer ownership and 10 percent employee ownership. Sixty farms have become full member-owners with voting rights in its governance. Hearty Roots' own CSA of roughly 1,000 members runs entirely through the app.
Farm Generations has also built a wholesale marketplace in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America, designed to make it easier for institutions to source from local farms. Gorgeous Goat Farm, a New Jersey goat dairy that sells throughout New York, came in as a beta tester and tripled its wholesale accounts.
"We've greatly expanded this farm's business, enabling them to reach more accounts," Lusher Shute says. "That's such a win for us, for them, and it's exactly what we want to do."
She credits the cooperative structure for the organic knowledge-sharing that follows. "The fact that we're a co-op kind of embeds this spirit of mutual aid and support and education that is really special. It's coming from the farmers."
GrownBy was the first farm platform approved by the USDA for SNAP Online, allowing customers to use EBT benefits to purchase CSA shares over the internet. The USDA piloted online EBT during Covid but limited it to large retailers. Navigating the certification process alone was out of reach for individual farms.
"What we've been able to do as a cooperative is certify the entire GrownBy platform. And it's free to the farm," Lusher Shute explains.
In the Hudson Valley, that infrastructure supports the CSA is a SNAP program, run with the Glynwood Center and the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, which gives SNAP participants a 50 percent discount on CSA shares. When federal SNAP funding came under threat last fall, Glynwood covered winter shares for EBT customers entirely. Community Food Works, a project of the Farm Hub in Kingston, is also using GrownBy's wholesale marketplace to distribute food to an expanding network of regional food pantries.
"All the tools are in place," Lusher Shute says. "We have a SNAP-enabled platform, farms that are participating, an organization stepping up to subsidize those shares. We're able to actually provide food security in real time."
From the Young Farmers Coalition to her seat on the Clermont town board, Lusher Shute has been finding systems solutions for farmers at every scale.
"Addressing technology is kind of a policy change, because we're providing alternatives for farmers who need to sell online and want to actually be partnering with a company that's on their side. Farm Generations is just another extension of that same work."
Outside, the crew at Hearty Roots is still putting seeds in the ground. Lusher Shute looks out the window. "Just amazing," she says.
GrownBy is available at grownby.app and in the Apple and Google Play app stores. Farms interested in joining the Farm Generations Cooperative can learn more at coop.grownby.com.
