From a Manhattan Apartment, a Mother and Son Grow an app to Find Famers’ Markets

The quiet hum of tractors and sprawling fields were miles away when the idea for FarmScout began to take shape. Far from the verdant countryside, the concrete jungle on Upper East Side was more likely to be filled with the wail of sirens from an an ambulance, a fire truck or a police cruiser. Added to that was a mother frustrated about how difficult it was to figure out where to shop for fresh produce beyond the supermarket and an 11-year-old who knew how to code.

Heather Spinelli brought the idea for FarmScout to her then-11-year-old son, Luca.

Spinelli had spent the previous summer on eastern Long Island, which still has acres of farms. By Christmas break, she was thinking about creating an app for city dwellers to find farm products that her family relied on in her youth and which she still enjoys as an adult.

Her son, Luca, had been interested in coding since kindergarten. He made games, played around with new ideas and, according to his mother, was always thinking about what he could create next.

So one day, while the two were walking down East 52nd Street, she interrupted one of those ideas with one of her own.

“I said, ‘Listen, I got an idea,’” she recalled.

She wanted one place where someone could search for a tomato, an apple-picking farm or something happening at a nearby farm and find where to go.

She didn’t know how to build it but Luca thought he might be up for the challenge even though he was only 11 years old when the project began. For roughly two months, Luca worked on the first prototype. He experimented with different tools, built a working search function and helped create the original look that would eventually carry into the app.

He named it as well: FarmScout.

Soon, their Upper East Side apartment had become something of an unofficial development office.

Spinelli works full time as a video editor. On days she worked from home, Luca would come in carrying his iPad, ready to show her his latest progress.

“He’d come in with his iPad and be like, ‘Look at what I did,’” she said.

Sometimes she was still working. Sometimes she was on a Zoom call with a producer.

The idea he was so eager to show her had started months earlier on Long Island.

Spinelli grew up there and still spends time in the area. Last summer, while working long hours, she kept finding herself at the supermarket even though she wanted to shop at local farms and farm stands.

The farms were there. The problem was figuring out what they were selling.

One farm might post its products on Facebook, another might use Instagram while others had websites that were difficult to keep current. Sometimes the only advertisement was the old-fashioned kind: a sign along the road.

She wanted to be able to find tomatoes without searching half the internet for them.

“I just thought to myself, man, it would be really easy if there was an app where I could just type in, like, spinach or tomatoes, and it tells me exactly which farm stand has that,” she said.

She imagined doing the same for things to do, from apple and pumpkin picking to music at vineyards.

Instead of knowing the farm and then searching for what it offered, she wanted to start with what someone wanted and work backward.

That idea has since traveled much farther than Long Island.

After initially focusing on New York, FarmScout expanded nationwide in July. The app now includes more than 12,000 farm and agricultural listings across all 50 states. Spinelli said it had reached about 2,550 downloads by the time she spoke with Our Town.

For New Yorkers, FarmScout does not require leaving the city. She said FarmScout includes New York City Greenmarkets and their vendors, giving users another way to discover what may already be around the corner.

She recently showed FarmScout to a colleague and pulled up markets around her.

One was about three blocks from the woman’s home. She had no idea it was there.

For her, making farms easier to find is about more than shaving a few minutes off a search. Long before she was trying to help strangers find farms, one helped feed her.

Spinelli grew up in Center Moriches. Her parents were divorced and she remembers periods when her family struggled financially.

They lived around farms and her mother would take them to a small local egg farm, where eggs offered something inexpensive, filling and versatile enough to become dinner. Then came whatever vegetables were in season.

“We relied on that egg farm,” she said.

The farm is gone now and in its place is a condominium development. Her mother had warned her as a child to remember the farms around them because some would not be there when she got older.

Her mother was right and that history now sits in the foundation underneath FarmScout.

Farmers do not have to pay to claim their listings or update their products and events and FarmScout does not take a commission on their sales. Customer subscriptions, which cost $14.99 a year, help cover the cost of running the app.

For Spinelli, the hope is to make it easier for people to find small farms without giving farmers another expensive place they have to maintain just to be found.

For Luca, the project that started during Christmas break looks much different from the prototype he built at 11. FarmScout has made it into all 50 states.

Luca is 12 now and his mother still remembers trying to work from their apartment as he appeared beside her with his iPad, eager to show her his latest addition.

“Look at what I did,” he’d tell her.

A year ago, what he had done fit on the screen in his hands.