Product
Fieldnote opens its farm-routing API to co-op partners
Maya Okonjo’s two-person company will let co-ops build on the routing engine directly — free under 40 member farms, priced above it.
Fieldnote opened its farm-routing API to co-op partners on Thursday, letting cooperatives pull pickup schedules and route plans directly into their own systems instead of through the company’s web app. Access is free for co-ops with fewer than 40 member farms and priced per route above that.
The company is Maya Okonjo and one engineer. It builds routing software for the trucks that collect produce from small farms and consolidate it — a problem that is arithmetic on a whiteboard until the ninth farm, and then is not.
The API exposes three things: the daily route plan, the pickup windows Fieldnote calculates for each farm, and the reshuffle it performs when a farm cancels. That last one is what co-ops have been asking for, Okonjo says. Several were already scraping the reshuffle out of the web interface and pasting it into their own dispatch tools, which she describes as a reasonable thing to do to software that did not offer a door.
If four customers are screen-scraping you, that isn’t misuse. That’s a spec.
The 40-farm line is deliberate and, Okonjo concedes, somewhat arbitrary. It is roughly the size at which a co-op tends to employ someone whose job is dispatch, and therefore the size at which the routing is worth money to them rather than a Saturday chore. Below it, she would rather have the usage than the invoice.
Rate limits start at 500 calls a day on the free tier, which she notes is more than a 40-farm co-op could plausibly need and is set there so nobody has to think about it. Paid tiers are metered per route planned, not per call.
Fieldnote has no plans to publish the routing engine itself, and Okonjo was direct about why: it is the company. The API, she said, is the part customers were already taking.