Markets

Farming is hard work. The work starts long before a single seed is planted, with crop planning, ordering seeds, and prepping beds. It continues with planting, weeding, and watering, and culminates with harvesting. Harvesting is a great pleasure; it is the culmination of all that hard work, a time to literally reap the fruits of your labor.  It is deeply satisfying to look upon a crate of gorgeous lettuce mix and know that my hard work helped make it happen.  But as rewarding and satisfying as the harvest may be, it is far from the end of the hard work, because that gorgeous lettuce probably still needs to be sold.

As a farmer, I have many options available to me for selling my food, each with its own set of pros and cons. I could offer a CSA (community supported agriculture) program, having customers prepay for a box of produce every week. In that case, my produce would already be sold at the time of harvest, but I would probably be pretty stressed out every week about whether I had enough food to fill the boxes and enough variety to keep my customers happy ("Collard greens, again?  We got those last week!").

I could also sell to restaurants through established accounts, contacting the restaurants each week to let them know what and how much is available.  In this scenario, the produce may or may not be sold at the time of harvest.  Restaurants are picky, typically only wanting top-quality produce, which leaves any imperfect produce without a buyer.  In addition, while I would be proud to have my produce on the menu at a high-end restaurant, my goal of growing healthy food for those who need it would not be met.  A third option, selling to grocery stores, is very similar to the restaurant approach. 

Another option is to sell at a farmers' market.  I can bring whatever produce I have to the market, even imperfect produce, but I have to pay a fee to the market organizer for my booth space, set up and break down the display, and spend hours off the farm (but on my feet) at the market, hoping that people buy my produce.  If nobody buys my food, it will be too limp after sitting in the sun for hours to try to sell again.

Finally, I can sell my produce at a farmstand. Located on or near my own property, a farmstand allows me to sell whatever I have without having to pay a booth fee, but I have to do all the marketing myself. If I don't advertise well enough, there will be no customers to buy my fruits and veggies. 

So what is a farmer to do?  I've opted for a combination of numbers two through five above, trying not to put all my eggs in one basket.  We have a accounts with a couple of area restaurants, sell to a local grocery store that believes in supporting local growers, sell at the Midtown Farmers' Market on Saturdays, and host a farmstand right outside our gate on Tuesday afternoons.  Each week, we have to figure out which produce should go where.  Should the lettuce mix be sold to the grocery store on Thursday, or should we save it for the farmers' market on Saturday?  The grocery store gets wholesale pricing, so we make less per pound, but it's a guaranteed sale, unlike the farmers' market, where the lettuce might languish.  The decisions aren't easy, but we make them, trying to balance the sometimes competing goals of making money, improving access to healthy food, and not letting food go to waste.

As I write this post, feet aching from standing at three markets last week while my tomato plants desperately needed trellising, part of me wishes that I could shift the balance toward more restaurant and retail accounts so that I could spend more time on the farm tending to crops and less time standing behind a table hawking my wares. But then I wouldn't get to meet the customer who told me that my lettuce mix and arugula were amazing, or the little boy who got so excited about a bunch of radishes.  "What is a farmer to do?" indeed.



Our booth at the Midtown Farmers' Market.

Our Tuesday farmstand at the Farm on Hurley Way.