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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> The farmer's share of a loaf of bread is 5% of the 
> retail price and 7% of the price of a can of tomatoes. The rest is 
> eaten up by processing, packaging, shipping, advertising and 
> retailing.

One would think, if one didn't think to hard or long on it, that this would 
be a huge advantage to the small producer.  Instead of 5% of the price, 
though 
direct sales and farmers markets we can manage 90% of the sale price, or 
more. 
 But there's a tragic flaw in the logic somewhere.  I'm not sure I have my 
finger on it, but I think it is somewhere in what you have said here.  The 
lettuce in supermarket has been a week in transit or longer, or much longer, 
and it 
can sit in the cooler having water misted over it for two or three more weeks 
before it is sold.  No one has to baby sit it, explain it to a customer, or 
any such.  Someone will happen by and take it to the checkout who is utterly 
unconcerned and uninterested in its existence except for that five seconds 
he's 
scanning it and putting it in the bag.

The organic lettuce I grew was all grown to eat, not to ship or sell.  So 
when I did want to sell it, I had a day or shorter to get it retted up and to 
a 
customer.  I could sell it the next day, or the next, but it was getting 
really 
substandard by the third.  I had to have a customer already expecting it when 
I picked it, no time to find a customer once it was bagged.  And I babied it 
and worried over it until it was gone.

The farmers market was not like markets of generations ago; it's much more 
hit and miss.  

>I, too, have attempted the farmer's market enterprise. Today I would 
far sooner compost my excess garden products.


I have of late come to the same conclusion.  I'm sure there's a way of doing 
it as a business, but soon the whole subsistence paradigm is hopelessly 
compromised.

This year, from starting seedlings in January until now when I'm preparing 
beds for fall root crops, it has been only with a determined effort that I 
keep 
in mind that I am only growing for my family.  I look at a bed of beans and 
begin to panic!  Not nearly enough planted in shell beans.  The I remember 
that 
I'm not selling any of them.  There's plenty and to spare.  One 30' fence 
came 
up with near 100% germination with half-runner beans.  I began preparing 
another 80' of fence in a flurry.  Then I recalled the average harvest of 
beans 
along that fence in the past.  If we only got beans from that one section of 
fence,. it's far more than enough for a generous year's supply and to spare.

Most crops here are transplanted from seedlings rather than direct sown.  I 
raked and smoothed a bed to start lettuce seedlings for a midseason crop, a 
4' 
x 4' bed, sixteen square feet.  When I took out the seeds to plant them, I 
again shook off the market garden paradigm and realized that if I planted 12" 
x 
6" in seeds, I'd have more plants that we could eat before the (larger) fall 
crop was going.  Turns out I could only make use of 1/4 of the plants as it 
was!