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435 Gonzalo Úrculo - Inside Crowdfarming’s model of 500,000 customers and 350 farmers
Description
An orange farm near Valencia, abandoned for a decade, a family debt, and a website. Seventeen years later: 500,000 customers, 350 partner farmers, 400 employees, and not a single discount ever run.
Gonzalo Úrculo is co-founder of Crowdfarming, the direct-to-consumer platform that connects European consumers directly with farmers — no wholesaler, no distributor, no price negotiation after harvest. He came back from his Erasmus in Berlin, talked his family out of selling the grandfather's farm, and spent the first two years renting a van to sell oranges face-to-face at markets in Paris and Berlin. The record before a Guardian article ran in 2012 was 20 orders a day. The day it ran: 240. The website collapsed.
The mechanic behind everything that followed is almost offensively simple: fruit is only picked when it is ordered. A Valencia orange reaches a kitchen in Germany in three to four days. The same orange through a conventional supply chain — including the organic one — takes a minimum of seventeen.
We walked the original citrus field together, trees all around us carrying name tags of their adopted owners somewhere in Germany, France, and Austria, and talked about the argument Gonzalo makes that gets him in trouble at French farming conferences.
In this episode:
— How the tree adoption model was invented by customers who showed up unannounced to visit their trees
— Why the business-plan target was 1,000 adoptions and they hit 10,000 in under a year
— Why customers forgive almost anything if you communicate honestly and in advance
— How picking only to order cuts waste structurally — not as a policy but as a consequence of the model
— Why predictable pre-season income is the one thing that makes regenerative transition economically rational for a farmer
— Why CAP subsidies are not going to farmers — they're going to supermarkets
— What Gonzalo would do with €1 billion, and why his magic wand answer is the same thing he built his entire company around
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making an