#5 We shared Real Time Farms and the importance of food transparency with a big audience at our favorite conference, TEDxManhattan: Changing the Way We Eat.

Don’t miss this year’s conference on February 16, 2013 – watch it live online!

#4 After leading over 50 people through our Food Warrior Internship Program, we released all of the curricula and materials for public use, so now it’s a DIY Food Warrior Program!

Our interns learned about food photography, food blogging, and food writing. They learned first hand about food production practices, the complexities of distribution, and contributed to a resource for all to know more about where their food comes from. These Food Warriors personally visited and documented 334 farms, 176 food artisans and 390 farmers markets and have uploaded more than 20,000 photos. Wow! Want to help document your local food system? Host your own program now!

#3 We got our 100th restaurant using our innovative technology to trace their menu’s ingredients from farm to plate.

#2  Our Data Powered Other Campaigns.

While our platform is neutral, our data continues to be used to power other campaigns. Data from RTF was used to power the FixAntibiotics Food Finder (Food Inc.’s Robby Kenner’s latest project) to help people find antibiotic free meat.

#1 We partnered with Food52.com, bringing our data to a new crowd – their nearly 1 million monthly unique visitors.

We’re pretty thrilled that as the first crowd sourced nationwide food guide, we got to partner with the nation’s first crowdsourced curated cooking site, so together we can help home cooks find and share the sources of their favorite ingredients. Read more about this partnership in Forbes: “How Food52’s New Partnership Could Revolutionize Online Cooking.“

In addition to these major highlights, we’d be remiss if we didn’t share the small victories as well. We added A LOT of data to the site…

• 2630 new farms -> for a total of 5830 farms
• 1500 new food artisans -> for a total of 3103 food artisans
• in collaboration with the USDA, we now have a complete dataset of the nation’s farmers markets -> a total of 6888 farmers markets
• 20,000 new photos of farms, their produce and livestock, farmers markets, food artisan goods, and more -> for a total of 51,000 photos

… and made a number of improvements to the site to make it look better and work better for YOU, including:

• a new front page with an interactive heat map
• the ability to add farms, food artisans, and farmers markets from the front page
• the ability to add goods and growing practices for farms, as well as the ability to filter and browse farms by certifications and growing practices
• ability to directly edit a list of farms and food artisans that are at a farmers market
• a better interface for editing a farmers market’s schedule
• a whole bunch of geeky tech stuff that would take too long to explain in English

We know 2013 will bring a closer integration with Food52. Already we have shifted our attention from our restaurant product to gathering data on seasonality, farms, food artisans, and farmers markets ~ ensuring Real Time Farms is the most dynamic crowd-sourced tool available. We hope our partnership will inspire consumers on Food52’s larger platform to make more educated decisions on what they eat, and we are really looking forward to seeing what the horizon looks like for this great melding!

Happy New Year from the Real Time Farms Team!