Market Farming

[Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>]

Steve, I am an American farmer.

And I most certainly see poor quality produce in the stores. 

Some of it was organically grown; some of it was conventionally grown; some of it was grown in the USA; some of it was grown in other countries. 

Some of it may have been fine when it left the farm, and have been mishandled by the shipper and/or the retailer. In other cases the damage is of a type that almost certainly occured in the field, and/or the lack of flavor is due to the produce being a shipping variety and harvested before full ripeness.

I'm selling produce bred and produced for flavor; which does, yes, cost more money to grow per marketable fruit. And I price as seconds, or give away, produce of a quality that I've seen priced and displayed as firsts on grocery shelves (yes, there's also a lot of lovely produce on the grocery shelves; though much of it is lovelier to the eye than to the taste buds).

We do, indeed, have the cheapest diet the world has ever seen. (Whether it's the most nutritious is much harder to determine.) We also have the fewest farmers as a percentage of population unit that the world has ever seen. Those of us who want to stay in business do need to be talking about quality.

If you want to object to a particular fashion of talking about quality, that''s fine. How to pull of the interesting trick of talking up one's own produce without running down the produce being sold by the grower at the next stall is certainly worth discussing; because that's what we need to be doing  (presuming the grower at the next stall isn't selling three week old junk that was bought from the supermarket because it wasn't good enough for the supermarket any longer -- I've seen that at something claiming to be a farmers' market, though not at any that I go to).

However, saying that we need to publicize great quality produce is not an attack on "American Farmers". There are, indeed, lots of "American Farmers" who are producing great food. Again, educating about quality is a way to keep such people in business. How does that amount to attacking them/us?

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly

Fresh-market organic produce, small scale

On Jan 17, 2011, at 2:30 PM, MAsteveINE wrote:

 

Yeah, pardon me for getting a bit prickely when folk bring up low quality and "nasty" while the American Farmers are

 

providing the cleanest, most nutritious and interesting, cheapest diet the world has ever seen.

 

Organic or conventional, we all have enough to share, and needs to fill, that there should be no room for the "I hate Monsanto"

 

and the "I hate American Farmers" crowd.

 

That is all I will have to say on this subject here.

 

 

MAsteveINE