Market Farming

[EBCreek AT aol.com]

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