Building a free tool for local food sharing , would love your thoughts

Hello everyone 👋

I’m Aurelia, a gardener and web developer from Moldova, and I’d like to share an experiment I’ve been working on, mainly to get feedback from people who care about land, food, and community.

I grew up around small-scale farming. My parents have a small homestead with cows and a peach and walnut orchard, and they sell their produce locally. Over the years, through gardening myself and listening to permaculture and land-restoration discussions, one question kept coming back to me:

How do people who grow food find people who value it, without middlemen, ads, or pressure to “scale”?

So I started building LocalRoots, a free, ad-free platform focused on:

sharing surplus food

connecting neighbors, farmers, and gardeners locally

helping small food communities form naturally, around proximity and trust

The idea isn’t about “selling more,” but about:

knowing where food comes from

making it easier to share or exchange locally

supporting small growers, hobby gardeners, and homesteads

Right now it’s very much an MVP, but it already allows people to:

list what they grow or produce

discover local food on a map

connect directly through messaging or small groups

I’m not here to promote or sell anything. I’d genuinely love thoughtful feedback from this community:

Does something like this feel useful?

What would make it more aligned with permaculture values?

What would you avoid in a tool like this?

If anyone is curious, the project is here: localroots.earth

Thanks for reading, and for all the knowledge that’s shared on this forum. It’s been an inspiration more than once.

Warmly,
Aurelia