Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

market-farming - RE: Virtual Farmers Markets???

market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Market Farming

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: EBCreek AT aol.com
  • To: <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: Virtual Farmers Markets???
  • Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 12:18:02 EDT


Allison -

This is the strangest coincidence. The following is a post I was composing
just this week:

I love the discussions on this group and would like to tell you all about how
we sell. First a little background:

We live on 5 acres on Central Ohio and have been seriously gardening for
ourselves for quite a long time. At one point we realized we really enjoyed
the work and believed in sustainable local agriculture and decided to try our
hand at selling.

We have tried two approaches. One is going to local farmer's markets. We've
not had a lot of luck, and are often frustrated by the number of hours we
needed to spend harvesting, packaging, going, setting up , tearing down, etc.
with limited success. I do understand that consistency is important in
selling at a particular market, but we're just not big enough to be there
every week (besides the 4 kids are tough to handle there.)

Our second approach has been working for a few years now. Since I work in
the city anyway, we decided to offer our crops to my co-workers once a week,
through an e-mailed price list. Harvesting and packaging happen in the
evenings and my delivery costs ("To the desktop"!) are virtually zero.

Eventually, we'd like to expand this notion to neighborhood clusters of
customers that we could deliver to once a week (like the old produce truck
that used to come through my neighborhood as a kid). The difference here is
that we only put on the list what we actually have (lower pressure than a
CSA), I can take a week of vacation (except we have to catch up on weeding!),
and we don't have to pick anything we will not sell.

To this point, we've got a core of satisfied customers throughout the spring
and summer that are sold on our specific specialties (e.g., lettuce, spicy
greens, sugar snap peas, fresh herbs, tomatoes, salsa mix (all ingredients
for a fresh salsa in a bag, etc.)

I'd love to hear the group's collective wisdom applied to this model.

Dave
Elderberry Creek Homestead
Sunbury, OH
EBCreek AT aol.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Allison Brown [mailto:[redacted]@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 11:40 AM
To: Market Farming
Subject: [market-farming] Virtual Farmers Markets???


I am presenting a paper on Virtual Farmers Markets at
the annual meeting of the American Society for
Horticultural Science at the end of July. My talk will
be on the potential use of the internet to first
supplement or replace face-to-face direct marketing.

I would be interested in hearing stories about
successful and unsuccessful ventures into
cyberretailing.

I am also interested in reactions to the following
statement:

"If a good management model for VFMs can be developed,
one which is easy to use and profitable, increasing
numbers of growers may find that they prefer not to
leave their farms to attend physical farmers markets
any longer."


If you have a story to tell, you can send it to me on
this email address or post it for the group to see. I
will respect the privacy of anyone who writes to me
direct unless you tell me that I may use your name. It
would help if you would mention your state/province in
the message and include whativer description of your
operation you feel comfortable in providing.

Thanks,

Allison Brown







  • Virtual Farmers Markets???, Allison Brown, 06/01/2001
    • <Possible follow-up(s)>
    • RE: Virtual Farmers Markets???, EBCreek, 06/01/2001

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page