The graduate students could have raked in pricey consulting fees, but the Harman family instead brought their favorite form of currency — tomatoes.

The students in Georgia Tech's global executive MBA program in Atlanta have pooled their talents to help develop a business plan and Web site for the family's tomato farm in Opelika, Ala.

The Harmans started the project two years ago to raise more than $100,000 needed to outfit a sport utility vehicle for their 17-year-old daughter, Megan, who uses a wheelchair because of arthrogryposis, a congenital tissue disorder.

Now the Harmans have the expertise of 48 business consultants to help them with their labor of love, a project the students nicknamed "Donate-o Tomato."

"That's education you can't teach in the classroom: folks coming together where students use knowledge to help the community," said Joe Urban, the Georgia Tech student who pitched the service project to his classmates last fall.

Urban, a manager for medical devices company Spectranetics, first heard about the Harmans while making a visit to East Alabama Medical Center where Megan's mother, Rita, works. Every student signed on to help after he pitched the idea to his class.

The students — most of whom have full-time jobs aside from their school work — revamped the Harmans' Web site, researched affordable packaging options, located easy-to-use accounting software and developed a marketing plan for the farm.

The class made its presentation to the family last month at Georgia Tech. In exchange, the family offered the students boxes of their freshly picked tomatoes.

The students recommended the family give out free recipe cards to customers looking for ways to cook their tomatoes, start a blog so that buyers could check in on the farm virtually and develop a board of advisers to help out.

With the students' advice, the Harmans are hoping to raise about $113,000 to buy and equip the vehicle with the technology necessary for Megan to drive. She needs a joystick to steer and voice-activated controls for the gears, radio, windows, blinkers and other features.

"I'm praying for a way to get the van," Megan said during a recent interview at her home. "Then I will be able to hang out with my friends."

Megan wants the freedom to drive herself when she starts college at nearby Auburn University in a year. And it's tough to always have to depend on her parents, who work full time aside from their roles on the farm, or her 16-year-old brother, Ben.

The family didn't want to ask for donations from the small Alabama community where they live, a working-class town of about 25,000 people. Instead, they built a greenhouse in 2006 and began growing tomatoes to raise the money themselves.

"We wanted to show them that what you get is what you work for and things in life don't come easy or free," Rita Harman said about her five children, ages 5 to 17.

The nearly 600 tomato plants are grown hydroponically in a heated greenhouse, and the family uses lady bugs, which feed on garden pests, to protect the fruit instead of pesticides.

The tomatoes are grown in the greenhouse in the winter and sold from February through the Fourth of July.

That's why the Harmans were able to weather the salmonella outbreaks without much impact on sales — they could guarantee customers that the tomatoes were free of the dangerous disease because of how they were grown.

Everyone in the family helps out with the farm, even the 5-year-old twins. Megan does most of the data entry and computer work for the business and greets customers as they come to the farm store.

During harvesting months, the family picks about 120 pounds of tomatoes a day. Last year, the Harmans grew 17,000 pounds. They hope to double that amount with the help of the Georgia Tech students.

The Harmans soon hope to take their new business plan to the bank and ask for a loan for a new greenhouse, this one with room for more tomatoes and even lettuce.

"Having a business plan is just going to give so much more substantial credit to what we're doing," Rita Harman said.