The Earthly Marketplace
by Lorna Anne Tierney, Founder
Calling all Independent Organic Growers from all over Ireland!
Introducing The Earthy Marketplace; the first of its kind All-Ireland Resource Hub for Conscious Consumerism. We’re in search of Independent Organic Growers from up and down the country to join our unique and supportive service. You can visit The Earthy Marketplace The Earthy Marketplace-Home.
Small farmers and small businesses alike are constantly up against major producers who can drive down prices and monopolise the market. In order to compete, we believe that we need to promote and support conscious businesses and farms like yours as well as the concept of conscious consumerism. Conscious consumerism is about making purchasing decisions that have a positive social, economic, and environmental impact. The Earthy Marketplace features three main cohorts of sustainable businesses; local Independent Organic Growers, plant-based food places, and small sustainable businesses from all over Ireland. By uniting under one banner and working together, we aim to increase the visibility of your business to a broader audience of like-minded consumers and achieve a sense of convenience around sustainable consumerism.
The Earthy Marketplace just launched on November 16th and we already have so many wonderful businesses and farms taking part! But we would love to engage with many, many more farmers. Our goal is to highlight these small, often family-run businesses to give them the support they need and deserve. We are looking into additional ways in which we can help the Irish people get to know their local growers as well as educate them about where their food comes from.
The Earthy Marketplace, which is a subscription-based service available to all suitable business types also showcases a range of additional services intended to broaden the project’s scope, appeal to the wider public, directly contribute to sustainability in Ireland and support small businesses and farmers alike. When visiting TEM, you will find menu items such as Earthy Offers, Earthy Events, and Earthy Notices. If you are looking to hire or recruit volunteers for the farm, Earthy Notices is the place to let the public know you are in search. Earthy Offer is a great place to advertise produce you may be finding hard to shift to avoid food waste and still make money for your hard work. Lastly, Earthy Events; here you can advertise any upcoming free public events that you may be hosting for example; a tour of the farm, a community event, a family event, a seasonal event, or any creative activity you can think of really to increase visibility and help create more connections within our communities. Visitors to our website will also discover our three main category buttons; ‘Farm Finder’, ‘Earthy Eats’ and ‘Shop Sustainable’ where they can expect to easily find the respective associated businesses. Soon we will also be launching our Android App which will be available to download and install to your device for free from the Google Play Store making TEM even more accessible to our users.
The Earthy Marketplace goes even further with its drive to give back to nature directly. Every month, with the help of the tree-planting initiative Reforest Nation, TEM has decided to ensure that a percentage of its service fee goes towards planting native Irish trees. If members wish to help in this tree planting mission, they can opt-in to plant one or two native trees monthly depending on which membership package they choose. This will contribute not only towards offsetting the carbon footprint of The Earthy Marketplace community but also aid biodiversity and help to reforest and re-wild Ireland.
We only wish we could offer this great Service completely free but in order to keep us moving forward and to fund our tree planting mission, we must ask for a very small monthly fee to make this all possible. We have created a price plan that we believe is both fair and excellent value for the many services on offer to spotlight and promote businesses and farms at The Earthy Marketplace. This can be seen on our website in ‘Membership’. The best part however is, if just ONE customer per month decides to spend as little as €9.50 or less as a result of discovering you on TEM then everybody wins! If you should decide to opt in to plant native trees monthly too, of course the benefits of doing so are priceless!
As a special offer we would like to offer OGI Farmers the following; personalised business listing of their Farm on The Earthy Marketplace with full access to all our Earthy Services for 1 full year plus 1 native tree planted on behalf of their Farm every month for just €6.50 per/month. The Earthy Marketplace does not take any commission on sales. Your sales are your own and we hope you have many! The monthly subscription fee is all that will be required to pay in order to avail of our Service. If you’re interested to learn more about The Earthy Marketplace, we would love to hear from you. You can get in touch at info@theearthymarketplace.com.