SECAF: Registry and Quotations for Family Farming in Ceará
State Registry System for Family Farmers, Entrepreneurs and Cooperatives
System built for the State Agrarian Development Secretariat of Ceará (SDA) to register family farmers, individual entrepreneurs and cooperatives, and to run the notice, quotation and proposal flow behind the State Family Farming Food Acquisition Policy — with over 20,000 registered producers.
SECAF is the state registry that formalizes producers, entrepreneurs and cooperatives in Ceará's family farming sector and runs the notice, quotation and proposal flow behind the State Family Farming Food Acquisition Policy, with over 20,000 registered producers.
Context and Purpose
SECAF (State Registry System for Family Farmers, Individual Entrepreneurs and Representative Enterprises) is the official registry the State Agrarian Development Secretariat of Ceará (SDA) uses, through the Territorial Development, Cooperativism, Commercialization and Solidarity Economy Coordination (Codece), to formalize the origin of Ceará's family-farming products. It's the base instrument of the State Family Farming Food Acquisition Policy, governed by State Law 15,910/2015, and the registry that feeds institutional food-purchase programs such as Ceará Sem Fome.
System modules
- Registrations — individual farmers, entrepreneurs and cooperatives/associations
- Sales Project — linking the producer to open notices and quotations
- Ceará Sem Fome — institutional food-purchase module
- Cooperative Hub — consolidated view by entity and managing unit
- Reports and Messages — tracking and communication with producers and cooperatives
Quotations module: open quotations listing, with search, columns and export
Quotation and Proposal Flow
SECAF's operational core is the flow that connects a purchase demand to an actual food delivery. A notice opens a quotation linked to a demanding unit, with a defined delivery schedule. From there, registered producers and cooperatives respond with an Individual Proposal or a Collective Proposal — the latter grouping bids from several entities under the same quotation and managing unit, each with a CNPJ, proposed amount and status (Sent, Open, Rejected) tracked individually.
Quotation Opening: demanding unit, deadlines and delivery schedule for a quotation
Each quotation carries the data that defines the supply window — demanding unit, start and end dates, delivery schedule and municipality — and it's from there that the rest of the flow is organized, including the history of proposals received and each one's status.
In the Collective Proposal, the system groups proposals by quotation and by managing unit — usually an association or institute representing a group of cooperatives — showing, side by side, the proposed amount and status of each participating entity. This grouping is what gives the Secretariat the management view of how many cooperatives are competing for each quotation and what stage each proposal is at.
Collective Proposal: proposals grouped by quotation and managing unit, with amount and status per entity
Some figures shown in this case study's images were hidden due to the confidentiality of the Secretariat's data.
Architecture and Stack
SECAF combines two fronts: a .NET/C# core handling producer and cooperative registration along with validation business rules (documentation, CNPJ/CPF, per-profile eligibility), and a set of operational panels in PHP for the notice, quotation and proposal flow used day-to-day by the Secretariat's teams and by the cooperatives. The application runs containerized with Docker and is version-controlled via Git, following the same infrastructure pattern used across SDA's other systems.
Validated registry
Distinct documentation and eligibility rules per profile: individual farmer, entrepreneur and cooperative.
Proposal integrity
Amount and status of each proposal tracked per entity, avoiding divergence between quotation and proposal.
Standardized environments
Docker isolating development and production environments, with deploys version-controlled via Git.
Project Impact
SECAF today sustains over 20,000 registered producers and the quotation flow that decides, in practice, which cooperatives supply food for the Secretariat's programs, with 99.6% uptime across 14 months in production. It's the registry that guarantees the origin traceability required by the State Family Farming Food Acquisition Policy, from a producer's first registration through to a quotation's winning proposal.
SECAF put me in direct contact with the last mile of a public policy: every registration and every proposal in the system represents a producer or cooperative trying to sell their production to the state. Keeping that flow — from validated registration through to the opening and judgment of each quotation — stable and reliable for 20,000 producers was one of the projects that most demanded rigor from me as a senior developer, across registration, business rules and the Secretariat teams' daily operation.
Key Challenges Faced
SECAF had to support, in the same system, the formal registration of thousands of producers and cooperatives, and the operational quotation flow that, in practice, decides who supplies food for the state's programs.
Modeling a single registry for individual farmers, entrepreneurs and cooperatives, each profile with its own validation and documentation rules
Structuring the notice → quotation opening → individual/collective proposal flow while keeping status and amounts consistent per cooperative
Ensuring the producer registry fed the Ceará Sem Fome module without duplicating data or opening room for inconsistency
Structural Technical Indicators
- 20,000+ producers registered in the system
- 99.6% uptime in production
- 14 months of continuous production operation
- Full quotation flow: notice, opening, individual and collective proposal
- Direct integration with the Ceará Sem Fome program
- Containerized environment with Docker, version-controlled via Git