INDYpendent Bytes

10/31/2026

Do you know someone who works in school nutrition or manages food purchasing for a school district?

I'm looking to connect with School Nutrition Directors, Food Service Directors, procurement professionals, and anyone familiar with how Indiana schools purchase fresh produce.

I'm the founder of INDYpendent Bytes, a Central Indiana initiative developing coordination infrastructure to help independent local farms serve business and institutional buyers.

I'm conducting interviews to better understand:

- How schools plan and purchase fresh produce
- How purchasing cooperatives, distributors, and contracts influence sourcing decisions
- What challenges schools face when purchasing locally grown food
- What would make working with smaller Indiana farms more practical

I'm also exploring Cultivator Campus, an agricultural entrepreneurship initiative where students could gain hands-on business experience growing and selling produce, potentially including sales to their own school cafeterias.

I'm not selling anything. I'm looking to learn from the people who actually do this work.

Even 20–30 minutes would be incredibly helpful.

If you work in school nutrition, I'd love to speak with you. If you know someone who does, please tag them, share this post, or send me a message.

I'm especially interested in connections throughout Central Indiana, but perspectives from elsewhere in Indiana are welcome!

10/15/2026

Central Indiana food people — I need your help tonight. I'm in Purdue's NSF I-Corps program doing customer-discovery research on how organizations buy food, and I need five more 15-minute conversations before midnight. Just you walking me through how food buying works in your world — no pitch, I just listen.

If you buy food for a school, nonprofit, restaurant, hospital, or any institution — or you know someone who does — comment or DM me your number and I'll call you. Short on time? Answer a few quick questions instead: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeweAAtWuswtgKTtDqYMnI3zKr9kUP61p7OwInUcXfL5rWV4Q/viewform

Shares appreciated!

09/30/2026

"This is a call to all of us, activists, donors, investors, researchers, policymakers, farmers, food workers, communities, entrepreneurs, and eaters, to develop and practice these approaches to tackling the deeper dysfunctions of our food system, especially those rooted in financial flows, even as we work to lessen its immediate harms. We all depend on our food system, and we all have a role to play in transforming it.”

Shift the money. Shift the power.
https://organicconsumers.org/food-land-and-money/

09/30/2026

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09/25/2026

09/18/2026

I have a question, and I actually want people to answer this.

Think about the last time you needed help with something — housing, food, transportation, childcare, employment, starting a business, healthcare, legal help, literally anything.

How did you figure out where to go?

And more importantly:

How many places did you have to call, Google, message, visit, or get referred to before you actually found something that could help you?

If you never found what you needed, say that too.

I'm curious how people actually navigate resources when they need them — not how the system assumes they do.

09/14/2026

We are convening a working research workshop to identify what information, definitions, governance safeguards, and research methods are needed for more trustworthy regional food-system decision-making.

Working title: Shared Data Standards for Regional Food-System Decision Infrastructure.
The problem is not that food-system actors lack data. The problem is that existing information often cannot be compared, connected, interpreted, reused, or governed responsibly across organizations and time.

We are recruiting active participants who create operational records, use information to make decisions, live with the consequences of incomplete information, or are responsible for governance, privacy, interoperability, or research validity.

What active participation requires:
a short pre-workshop survey
a description of at least one relevant workflow or data source
structured working-group input
review of synthesized findings for accuracy and disclosure risk

What it does not require:
raw operational, transaction, financial, production, or customer data
adoption of a platform
technical integration
a commitment to a future pilot

If you work in production, procurement, aggregation, Extension, public planning, data governance, or community food access — and you can speak to a real workflow, not just an organizational endorsement — we want you in the room.

Reply, quote-post with your role, or DM

09/05/2026

Evidence Can Tell You What Not to Build

One of the most useful things evidence can do is tell you not to build something.

When you are working on a system that touches buyers, producers, logistics, technology and community organizations, it is easy to assume every promising relationship should become another integration or another layer.

Sometimes the better result is learning where the system should stop.

A conversation can show that an organization already has a workflow it wants to protect, that the proposed interface creates more work instead of less, or simply that the problem is being described in language that does not match how participants experience it.

That is still progress.

At INDYpendent Bytes, I want the operating model to get narrower as the evidence gets stronger—not larger just because more possibilities appear.

The goal is not to make every early assumption work. It is to keep testing until what remains is practical for the people expected to make the system function.

08/29/2026

Every other product sold has a county of origin, why not our meat?

Marjorie Taylor Greene responded on X to Trump’s announcement that, for the next "90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff."

Greene responded:

"If Trump really wanted to lower beef prices he would support Massie’s PRIME Act which allows individual states to permit local custom slaughterhouses to sell individual cuts of meat directly to consumers, restaurants, and grocery stores within that same state. But instead the Big Four major meat processors in America control over 85% of the market and consequently the cost of processing meat is high. But with Massie’s PRIME Act, small processors would be allowed to compete and would drive down costs. It would also help smaller meat producers to sell their beef to local markets.

And we need Country of Origin labeling for foreign imported and foreign processed meats. Americans deserve to know where the meat they are buying to feed themselves and their families is coming from, and we have the right to reject it based on its country of origin.

Both of these I cosponsored and are Republican sponsored bills, why won’t the Republican controlled Congress pass these bills?

Why won’t the Republican elected President support these legislations which are America First?

The answer is the Big Four meat processors and their well paid lobbyists roam the halls of congress and get to go to meetings and fundraisers at the White House and YOU don’t!"