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  • From: "RDH" <rdhopkins AT americanpasturage.com>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Roadside Stands
  • Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 07:34:41 -0500


Phil and others.

Your rural community is not alone as I'm sure you are aware. As we have
given up much of our manufacturing base, we also give up our ability to
sustain rural communities due to a shift in incomes and increased demands on
family priorities. How many of us remember when only one parent worked and
earned enough for a decent home and we time and money enough to enjoy a few
pleasures?

With an impending war in the middle east, much of our country revenues will
leave our borders in support of a military action. We no longer support a
buy America act and the skilled labor to build and operate intensive
manufacturing is fast dissolving.

The effects we see as farmers are part of this domino effect where time as
well as money become the limiting factor in how much of the food in this
country is prepared. It won't be long before we are like many of the
European communities where food shopping is a daily routine and eating out
will become a luxury. The costs of eating out have sky rocketed, but
Americans have made the choice and caused a boom in the service industry.
This snowball has a breaking point as we have seen in some of the eastern
metro areas that experienced huge growth curves in the 80's.

I have to disagree with the idea that we as farmers must pursue the TV
dinner mentality by taking the plunge into heat and eat products. We have
an intense schedule with commutes, multiple jobs, running a farm, and full
time advocacy for sustainable agriculture and family farms. We still have
time for one of us to prepare a home cooked meal from fresh vegetables and
farm raised meats.

In my humble opinion, the idea we should be promoting is to get consumers to
understand that cooking skills are not something we are born with and that
each trip to the kitchen is an experiment. We prepare a great deal of one
or two pot meals that require no more time than the trips to the market for
heat and eat and the associated cooking time. It is possible to prepare
many healthful meals from farm raised foods that require less than 30
minutes including cleanup.

Many of the marketing attempts for local grown products involve chefs. No
discredit to the chefs, but we should have farm families showing the
consumers how to prepare quick and inexpensive meals with our products. Few
people have the resources in their kitchens that most chefs have and
therefore while entertaining and educational, cooking demonstrations using
gourmet cooks don't sell farm fresh foods to consumers.

We do not eat traditional Midwestern foods. With our farm raised beef,
veal, and lamb and being a vendor at a Class A farmer's market, we have a
lot more opportunity that the average consumer to be extravagant in our food
choices. As a family of three, we feed ourselves for $6 a day per person
and we eat better than most of the white table cloth restaurants can
provide. You cannot eat the current offerings of TV dinners for that price.

It is up to the farmers to encourage support for the education needed to
awaken the consumers to the fact that they can eat healthier and cheaper by
supporting local grown food products. Is this possible in today's high
powered industry advertising? I believe as one of our legislators, that one
person can make a difference. I believe it was Dante who said that a small
spark is often followed by a large flame. If each of us takes on the
responsibility to become that small spark, we could have a roaring fire in
no time.

Rick Hopkins
President
American Pasturage, Inc.
P.O. Box 190
Marionville, MO 65705
(417) 258-2394
http://www.americanpasturage.com/
For other information concerning grass fed beef see http://www.eatwild.com
and http://www.westonaprice.org
For the American Homestead Foods Certification Program go to
http://www.homesteadfoods.com
Also check out the new Graziers Forum at: http://bbs.americanpasturage.com

All E-mails are scanned with Norton Anti Virus 2002 prior to sending.


-----Original Message-----
From: HackettShark AT aol.com [mailto:HackettShark AT aol.com]
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 7:07 AM
To: Market Farming
Subject: [market-farming] Re: Roadside Stands


In a message dated 9/26/02 11:23:55 PM Central Daylight Time,
mrfarm AT frontiernet.net writes:



Are others experiencing this kind of problem


In our area when the Sweet corn is gone you might as well just close up the
roadside stand. The people that are working in the city's do not want to
come home from work and fix a meal, they want to dig something out of the
freezer and throw it in the microwave and here's supper. Everything has
changed as to how the house wife fixes a supper meal. The wives and women
that work these Corporate Job's are beat up all day at work of doing two or
three person's worth of work because these Corp's have paid their upper
management way to much money so they can't afford to have the right amount
of employee's to get the job done, instead they make one person do two
peoples job's. I can't blame them for not wanting to prepare a lot of food.

Us Direct markets are going to have to do a better job of making our product
more consumer friendly by doing more processing and a lot more Value added
products to our line of products that we are selling. It just plain doesn't
work in our area any more the same way it did even a year ago. Everything
changes and it is changing very fast. We also don't have the people that we
did a year ago, we have lost a lot of folks out of our small towns around
here and that trend is still contiuning at a very fast rate. Again this
year we lost another 65 students for our small town and rural community.
Went this trend slows down maybe marketing our product will stabilize. I
still feel we are all going to have to change our products more consumer
friendly for our sales to keep growing.

Phil From Iowa
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