Ok, good. Keep it coming. My partners and I can grow, and shill, and talk to other growers, but to get something like this going we need models. Thanks.

Ok, good. Keep it coming. My partners and I can grow, and shill, and talk to other growers, but to get something like this going we need models. Thanks.

I somehow missed this a couple of days ago, and found it when a friend commented on a post I had written.

The problems are not exclusive to the US, although where the US leads the rest of us follow, and that includes repeating some of your mistakes.

When you consider the sorts of things that Wes Jackson of The Land Institute has been saying about community values and the rest of it, I'm wondering whether anyone has done a good economic analysis of how mid-swize farms stack up.

Shame that while he rightly praises our most excellent Carrboro Farmer's Market Tom Philpott exhibits such disdain for its symbiotic twin Weaver Street Market, the equally beloved local food coop he dismissively bunches with corporate giant Whole Foods in this article. Setting aside the fact that WSM's local food offerings are an order of magnitude or so greater than Whole Foods, the reality is that Carrboro/Chapel Hill's "incredibly vibrant local-food scene" owes an enormous debt to Weaver Street Market's relentless work over the last two decades, much of it in close coordination with Farmer's Market organizers. Example: together with the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association WSM has for many years co-sponsored what has become one of the largest local farm tours in the nation, for which it received an award this year from the National Cooperative Grocers Association, recognizing the event as a model for co-ops across the country. It's no exaggeration to say that without the consistent and long-term support that WSM has provided,  many of the farms that supply the "few visionary, and necessarily relatively expensive, restaurants" would probably not exist.

Weaver Street Market spends over two million dollars a year with local growers and food producers: as a percentage of twenty million dollars in total sales, I challenge Tom to show more than a handful of grocery stores in the country that can match, let alone exceed this record. Saturday mornings and Wednesday evenings finds crowds of local folks walking the four blocks from farmer's market to coop market, buying from each the best they have to offer. If Tom finds an insufficiency of local farm produce on the shelves at WSM he probably got there too late.

I was a farm manager on a certified organic farm of this scale...direct sales through CSA and farmers market as well as supplying several retailers. More folks need to put pressure on their grocers to buy from farms of this scale! Taking your business where smaller scale farms are represented is one part, but we must communicate this to the larger retailers as well.

On a side, many people are just too picky about produce. One blemish and they turn their nose up. You gotta love the person who comes up to the market table and says "i just dont trust corn w/o a little earworm damage."

Personally, I'd rather have a fresh, ripe tomatoe w/ a few marks than an immaculate one picked and shipped green then gassed to ripen. From personal experience, this kind of expectation of "quality" is the greatest roadblock to smaller organic farms entering the retail markets. I was told by a couple of retailers that the produce had to be able to maintain its quality after being shipped to regional warehouses and then back. Yeesh!

I disagree w/ the notion that mid-sized farms are too big for direct sales. We were selling 200+ shares annually, some of which were picked up weekly at the Farmers Market.