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  • From: Lucy Goodman <goodows AT infinet.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Re: Selling for other growers
  • Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 07:55:13 -0400

Matt,

Our market lets a limited amount of this sort of thing happen. We do require that the person that is not doing the selling themselves be a member of the market and pay all fees and we only let the reselling happen in cases of emergency, not every week. I don't agree with the rule personally but I was out voted at the meeting where this came up

You need to encourage her to start selling her own stuff ASAP. I see it this way, she has a pretty bad situation farming on her own but if you resell her stuff (and you are reselling, even though it is a local source and not a corporate source) now what is going to happen in her situation to make her come to market to sell the fruit herself? it will be a lot easier for her if you do it and since she is likely swamped with work an easy avenue is the one she will take

I would suggest to her that she hire help so that she can come to your market herself. In the long and short run this will be alot better for her farm business if she is there representing her farm.

You are starting down a slippery slope because if you are reselling what's to stop others from doing the same? And what is to stop someone from buying non local food and selling at the market? Rules? if you have a no reselling rule and you break others will follow suit and go much farther than the local farm to get their produce, this is human nature. If you allow reselling expect it to be source from non local sources eventually. If you make the market a resellers market the customers lose out because they are expecting a farmers' market and you will have a farmerless market. Also resellers can sell all day if they have too and at lower prices than a true farmer because they don't have to go home and do actual farm work nor do they have the over head of a farm. All they need is a truck/van and some tables and they are ready to sell and pretend they farm. this gives the real growers a servere disadvantage over the resellers. not to mention the farmer makes less than half as much selling to a vendor than if they sold the food themselves (of course it it is the grower's choice to sell wholesale)

Lucy Goodman
Boulder Belt Organics
New Paris, OH


cheselka AT theriver.com wrote:

Willie, points well taken.

Here's an actual situation I'm in right now. A lady and her husband bought
a pear and apple orchard from Farmer Brown (yep, his last name was actually
Brown) in 1998. To make ends meet, the husband has on off-farm job (VERY
off farm in that he's only home on the weekends). His wife is left to
attend to the orchard, which is a u-pick operation. She needs to therefore
be there all the time waiting for customers who come fairly frequently. Despite the u-pick being pretty successful, they still have gobs of pears
and apples either sitting in the cooler or rotting on the trees. She's
asked me (Grower A) to bring her (Grower B) excess, or at least some of it,
to the market. Depending on how you look at this, it *could* be called
reselling, but I'm not seeing it that way. The way I see it, she's selling
her stuff through me for X dollars, and I'm getting a percentage of the
sale as the middleman. The only difference is that I won't be taking a 90%
cut on the sale, but something more like 50%.

Another thing we thought of doing was making it such that The Market sold
items that couldn't be directly sold by the growers. So in essense The
Market would be the "reseller", or the middleman, or whatever you want to
call it. The Market would pocket the profits.

The fact is that she's in a situation where she *can't* go to the market(s)
and sell her stuff. I'd rather see locally and organically grown pears and
apples sold at the market than have them rotting on the trees. This also
gets stuff on the market tables where they'd otherwise be empty. We'll be
a small market for a while, so any extras are appreciated by everyone!

In the long term, it *would* be best to encourage her and others like her
to come sell this stuff herself. But in the short term, it seems like a
reasonable solution, as long as everyone wins. Perhaps something can be
put into the market rules to ensure that this doesn't become a big,
long-term problem.

Thanks for getting me thinking, Willie!! ;)

Matt Cheselka
Cosmic Lettuce

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