• U.S.

Farmers’ Marketing

4 minute read
Salma Abdelnour

Imagine getting a box of ripe, glistening fruits and vegetables dropped off at your door every week. The produce comes from small farms, not industrial growers, and you don’t have to stand in line at the grocery store or farmers’ market to buy it. You simply sign up with Full Circle, an organization that delivers organic produce straight to consumers. Now you can feel good about supporting family farms, eating well and saving time and gas money. It’s just like joining a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm share. Isn’t it?

Not exactly, but a growing number of companies are banking that you’ll think so. Farm shares started as a way to get communities to support local agriculture by asking consumers to pay a few hundred dollars up front for a season’s worth of produce. As the number of CSAs has increased from two New England farms in 1986 to an estimated 6,000 today, the emphasis has been on local produce–which, in addition to growing the local economy, helps reduce the environmental costs of shipping food long distances from industrial suppliers to stores. But as companies try to capitalize on the trend of farm shares, the movement risks coming–one might say–full circle.

Some enterprising chain supermarkets are selling produce from their local suppliers in CSA-style boxes, skimming off a margin of the farmers’ sales along the way. “They don’t get as much as if they sold it themselves at farmers’ markets,” explains Ron Williams, who created the Honestly Local box program for Ohio’s Dorothy Lane Markets. “But they get more than if they sell to a wholesaler.” This summer, North Carolina–based Lowes Foods is relaunching its Locally Grown Club, whose members buy boxes of local produce each week that the chain sells at a profit. In that regard, “the program works the same way as purchasing any other kind of produce from our stores,” says Heather George, Lowes Foods’ vice president of sales and merchandising.

Based in Carnation, Wash., Full Circle initially marketed itself as a CSA. But as the company expanded–it now delivers food from about 200 farms on the West Coast and Mexico to more than 18,000 customers in four states–critics balked: How can you ship California peaches to Alaska and still call yourself a CSA? So the company relabeled itself as a “farm-to-table organic delivery service.” California’s Farm Fresh to You and New York’s Urban Organic likewise traded the local farm share’s direct-to-customer model for a network of farms and doorstep delivery.

That kind of convenience has undeniable appeal. With traditional farm shares, customers have to show up at a certain time and place every week to get their produce, often from the farmers themselves. This personal contact reinforces a sense of investment in the farm and community. But miss that week’s pickup and you’re out of luck.

That’s why nonprofits like Farm Fresh Rhode Island–a group that unites the state’s farmers’ markets–are responding by boxing up produce, free of charge to the growers, and delivering it to customers who don’t have the time (or the transportation) to get to pickup sites. They also offer boxes that combine produce from local farms that sell at certain farmers’ markets, and all the revenue goes straight to participating farmers.

Even though for-profit companies like Full Circle see themselves as partners of CSAs, they also make it tempting not to shop directly from local farms. But initiatives like Farm Fresh Rhode Island’s stand a fighting chance against this kind of mission creep. For people committed to eating local without making the sacrifices farm shares usually entail, it’s getting easier to have your local kale and eat it too.

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