Abstract: With the rise of e-commerce for agriculture and local life service platforms, a farmer-citizen direct purchase model has emerged in agricultural product sales, broadening farmers’ income channels and stimulating rural revitalization. However, under this model, the lack of cooperation among fresh agricultural product logistics enterprises results in low vehicle utilization, high transportation costs, and significant losses, making it difficult to increase farmers’ income. To address this issue, this paper proposes a collaborative logistics model for farmer-citizen direct purchase, in which multiple logistics enterprises form an alliance to jointly undertake transportation tasks. First, a platform-based cooperative logistics operation process is designed. Second, considering the perishability and timeliness of fresh agricultural products, a multi-party collaborative two-stage vehicle routing problem with time windows is formulated and solved to minimize transportation and loss costs. Third, two cost-sharing methods are proposed for the alliance, and a farmer income model is developed to quantify income based on product demand and loss rate. Finally, numerical experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and analyze how key factors affect collaborative logistics efficiency. The results indicate that, compared with standalone transport models, the ‘farm-to-home’ collaborative logistics model can effectively reduce the total transport costs of logistics consortia and increase farmers’ incomes, whilst enabling all participating logistics enterprises to achieve significant cost savings. This model demonstrates a consistent cost-reduction and income-boosting effect across different regions and types of agricultural products, with its advantages being particularly pronounced in remote areas with relatively underdeveloped logistics infrastructure, as well as for perishable and time-sensitive agricultural products; Furthermore, when taking into account customer time-sensitivity requirements and the growth in customer base, the model becomes even more attractive to logistics enterprises and continues to drive increases in farmers’ income.

Key words: logistics collaboration, cost allocation, farmer-citizen direct connection, farmer income