Credibility

How people on this forum establish that they really farm — and what that implies for verifying them on a platform.

What people offer as proof

What this means for a verification check mark

The founding meeting proposed that anyone may self-declare as a farmer, with a separate reviewable form granting a check mark, and asked what proof signals could make that review automatable. This corpus answers it, mostly in the negative:

• A named business is the strongest automatable signal. It can be checked against corporate registration without a human reading anything.
• Association membership is the strongest institutional one — verifiable through the association itself, and the meeting already identified associations as the batch-onboarding channel. It is also the rarest thing people offer here (264 threads), which suggests asking for it will exclude many real farmers.
• A phone number proves nothing and is the second most common offering. Requiring one filters nobody.
• Location and farm size are the most common proofs of all, and they are falsifiable by neighbours rather than by a server — which points at community verification rather than document review.
• Photographs are persuasive here and trivially stolen. Treat them as presentation, not evidence.

Farmers have already built the missing piece themselves. Among the coordination threads is one collecting verified contact details specifically to defend against scams — a hand-rolled registry of people vouched for as real. See the registries → That is the check mark, existing as folk practice, and it exists because being sold something fake and being defrauded are the two most reported harms in this corpus.

What no family matched

The most common of the 4803 unmatched signals. Several are real credibility markers the taxonomy simply does not name — "professional tone", "citing external sources" — and a few are the model editorialising.