Good News from
Down on the
Small Farm

Three new reports on
how direct marketing
is transforming
one corner of
agriculture in America

uOn Good Land
uDynamic Farmers Marketing
uFarmers Markets: Consumer Trends, Preferences and Characteristics

The summer of ’98 is brimming with grim tidings for American farmers: drought, blazing heat, the end of many government subsidies, the loss of export markets to a deepening Asian economic crisis.

Against this backdrop, three new dispatches from the front lines of the revival of small-scale agriculture are an oasis of hope for American farming. The common theme running through each: outlets that enable farmers to sell directly to consumers have been a lifeline to relative prosperity for those adventurous and adaptable small farmers willing to seize the opportunity.

Suburban Survival

Farming for a living is no cakewalk, Michael Ableman makes clear in his latest book, "On Good Land." It is the engaging story of how he has managed to preserve a thriving remnant of agricultural productivity on a farm he has run since 1981 that is hemmed in on all sides by full blown suburbia just north of Santa Barbara, California.

Details from photos of Fairview
Gardens, in "On Good Land."
Photographs by Michael Ableman

Fairview Gardens 1998,
surrounded  by suburbia

At Fairview Gardens, starting out with a knowledge of grafting but no experience in running a farm, Ableman faces a succession of tribulations.

Neighbors hit him with nuisance actions because his compost stinks and his roosters crow. Snooty customers stomp out of his roadside stand incensed that his strawberries are 35 cents more expensive than the supermarket’s. An old sprayer keeps breaking down. Employees suddenly quit to go on surfing trips. And the owners of the 12-acre parcel want to sell it and subdivide it into 58 housing tracts.

Ableman and his crew triumph over all – overcoming that last and toughest challenge by setting up a nonprofit educational foundation to raise funds to buy out the owners for $62,500 an acre.

Fairview Gardens now serves as a showcase open to school kids and community members who want to find out how food is grown. But it also remains a viable commercial farm, producing enough food for 500 families, sold through farmers markets, the roadside stand and a 125- member community supported agricultural program.

Farmers Marketing How-to

Jeff Ishee’s self-published book, "Dynamic Farmers’ Marketing: A Guide to Successfully Selling Your Farmers Market Products," offers step-by-step advice about how to run a small farm of your own – from planning and planting to picking, packaging and marketing. The book also offers some detailed guidance about how to set up and manage a farmers market.

Ishee preaches what he has practiced. He, his wife and three children have created a two-acre market garden on their three-acre homestead in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. They sell their produce at the farmers market in Staunton that they also help organize and run.

Ishee has watched the market swell in size from a handful of farmers in its first year, 1993, to more than 30 in the last several years. There’s plenty of room for more, at least in his part of the country, he believes. "Right now, the demand for fresh local produce far exceeds the supply," he writes.

Ishee offers plenty of caveats, starting with the basic admonition that market gardening is hard, dirty, tiring work that "isn’t for everyone." But for him, "It is immensely satisfying to be a farmers’ marketer," Ishee exclaims.

Shopper Survey

A third publication just out offers some insight into what draws people to farmers market. The good news for the markets: it’s not cheap prices.

Though the middlemen are cut out of the picture, farmers markets aren’t necessarily bargain basements for food. Fruits and vegetables that are picked ripe are often more expensive than mass marketed produce grown on giant farms and shipped by the truckload to wholesalers.

According to this report, a survey of 336 patrons of New Jersey farmers markets, quality, freshness and contact with the grower are by far the most important things that bring them there. Farmers markets aren’t going to replace supermarkets, where virtually all respondents said they do some or most of their shopping. But farmers markets are firmly entrenched in a growing niche in the food marketplace. In New Jersey, where the survey was conducted. the number of markets has increased from 23 to 48 in the three years through 1997.

The study, "Farmers Markets: Consumer Trends, Preferences and Characteristics," was published in June 1998 by the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. It is available free of charge on request from Ravi Govindasamy, Rutgers Cooperative Extension, P.O. Box 231, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.