Market Farming

["gutierrez-lagatta" <gutierrez-lagatta AT home.com>]

Dave,
I like your concept of having customers order from your list.  I
joined a CSA this year and find things accumulating in my refrigerator
that I am not accustomed to cooking.  I'll eat anything, but
introducing 3 kids to new stuff week after week is a challenge!  If I
could order a la carte (how's that for a business name? A La Carte
Veggies)  I would prefer to do that.  In addition to issues related to
billing/collection, the trick to this is knowing what your customers
want and producing enough to meet demand, but not too much that you
are making lots of compost or donating more than is reasonable to the
local food pantry.  In that respect you are growing speculatively,
wheras the CSA grower is prepaid and can grow just the right amount.
I think home/neighborhood delivery is tricky because of all of the
households where everybody works duting the day.  Perhaps a core of
office buildings where you delivery will be better?  Such and such an
address from 5- 5:30, the next one from 5:30-5:45. this hospital from
3:00-3:30...Otherwise I fear that the only way to do neighborhood
deliveries would be on Saturdays or using some type of exchangeable
cooler boxes that people leave on their porches.

> 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.

Adriana