Food & Farm Trails and Trail Partners

Food & Farm Trails are moderated, themed collections of current FarmGateRun places curated by approved councils, tourism organisations, cooperatives, associations and other eligible organisations. They use the existing route planner; they are not a new navigation service and do not certify a business, road, booking, food, safety or accessibility information.

The feature is released in stages. If a trail or partner control described here is unavailable, its feature flag or pilot access may still be off.

Food & Farm Trails and Community Routes are different#

A Food & Farm Trail belongs to a verified Trail Partner organisation. Its submitted revisions are reviewed by FarmGateRun and each public version is an immutable approved snapshot.

A Community Route is a traveller-created route shared through the existing Community Routes workflow. Becoming a Trail Partner does not convert, claim or relabel a Community Route, and organisation membership does not change anyone's ordinary Traveller or Business permissions.

Explore and use a trail privately#

Open Explore → Food & Farm Trails, then choose a published trail. The page shows approved trail text and attribution from the current publication, while business names, visibility, locations, opening information, links and route eligibility are checked against each current listing.

You can add one available stop or all available stops to My Route, save a permitted private copy while signed in, or open the available stops in Google Maps. Those actions change only your private route. Duplicate, unavailable, delivery-only, opted-out or held stops are not added. A public start is general guidance; your private starting address or current location is never published to the trail.

Always check opening hours, bookings, access, road conditions, seasonal availability, safety and accessibility directly before travelling. A place may become unavailable after a trail version is published.

Who can apply as a Trail Partner#

Eligible applicants include councils and local governments, tourism organisations, cooperatives, incorporated regional, producer, industry or community associations, and other organisations FarmGateRun accepts after review. Eligibility is not automatic. An applicant uses a normal FarmGateRun account with an active, verified email; there is no separate account type.

The application asks for the legal and display names, official website and work contact, service area, public profile information, authority evidence, and current terms, privacy and content declarations. Evidence, applicant details, private phone numbers and administrator notes stay private. Applications can be draft, pending review, changes requested, approved, rejected or withdrawn. Approval creates or links one organisation and makes the applicant its first Owner. A rejected or withdrawn record is not reopened; a later attempt is a linked new application.

Organisation roles#

• Viewer: reads its organisation dashboard, private trail statuses, contribution statuses and aggregate organisation statistics where enabled.
• Editor: also creates and edits drafts and submits missing-place contributions, but cannot submit a trail revision or manage the team.
• Manager: also submits, withdraws and resubmits trail revisions; manages Viewer and Editor invitations and memberships; and edits non-identity profile fields.
• Owner: also manages Managers, transfers ownership through the explicit transfer action, and may request organisation closure. An ordinary invitation can never grant Owner.

No organisation role can publish its own trail or bypass FarmGateRun moderation. The final active Owner cannot be removed or demoted.

Open Organisation Profile from the private Trail Partner Dashboard to review the currently approved public organisation details. A Manager or Owner may submit a moderated public-profile, contact or service-area update. Only the Owner may request changes to the legal name, public name, organisation type, official identifier or official website, or request organisation archive. Approved public values stay unchanged while a request is under review or changes are requested. A permitted member may withdraw an active request. Logo changes are not available until the separate immutable approved-media moderation workflow is deployed and tested.

Create and submit a trail#

Editors, Managers and Owners can build an editable draft from eligible approved listings. Add factual trail text, an area, style, themes, duration, safe public start guidance, stop order and trail-specific notes. Use Move Up and Move Down as the keyboard alternative to any visual ordering control.

Only a Manager or Owner can submit, withdraw or resubmit a trail revision. A pending-review revision is frozen. If FarmGateRun requests changes, it becomes editable again. Rejected revisions are final, but a permitted new draft can copy suitable content. Publishing creates an immutable version; later draft work does not replace the current public version until a new revision is approved.

Submit a missing place#

An Editor, Manager or Owner may submit a missing place through the existing listing-contribution moderation workflow. Pending places stay private and do not count toward the two eligible stops required for publication. Approval or merge replaces the placeholder only through the recorded moderation result.

Submitting a place does not give the Trail Partner ownership or business-management rights. A business claim follows the normal separate verification process.

Rights, media and attribution#

Submit only text, logos, photographs, links and attribution that the organisation is authorised to publish. Record the requested credit and source, use approved public media, and accept the current declarations at final submission. A partner displayed on a trail is attribution only and receives no organisation-management authority.

Reports, corrections and removal#

Use the trail report action for inaccurate, unsafe, inaccessible, copied or otherwise unsuitable trail information. A verified owner or manager of a claimed listing can request removal from one trail or all Food & Farm Trails. A verified business request can create an immediate temporary hold; an unverified request requires verification before it can hide a place.

Privacy, legal and business opt-out holds hide the place's identity, address, image and coordinates from trail surfaces. An approved removal produces a new administrative publication with the stop removed and preserves the earlier version for audit. Rejecting or withdrawing a request restores the existing current publication only when no separate hold remains.

Review freshness and statistics#

Trail Partners should review trails when prompted and update material changes through moderation. A hold or unavailable stop may remove a trail from directory discovery without deleting its permanent page or changing its state during a visit.

Where trail statistics and a compatible analytics-consent mechanism are enabled, organisation members see only their own organisation's aggregate results using Australia/Brisbane reporting dates. Reports exclude recognised bots and FarmGateRun administrators and do not expose visitor identity, email, raw IP, private starts or raw session identifiers. Declining or not granting trail analytics consent creates no raw trail analytics event or new analytics session identifier.

Administrator moderation#

Trail administration uses separate view, moderation and settings capabilities. Moderators review applications, organisations, trail revisions, current stop eligibility, warnings, reports, rights and public previews. A moderator cannot approve a trail they submitted or one belonging to an organisation where they are an active member. Trail moderation does not grant canonical listing-moderation rights, and listing moderation does not grant trail-moderation rights.

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