Pivoting

Making local food more accessible

First of the season’s lettuce nearly ready for planting.

Each week during our “slow” season I try and tackle one cleaning project between the planting, harvesting, infrastructure, admin, and marketing it takes to run a farm. This week was the farm office. Piles of receipts, invoices, seed catalogs from years ago were occupying the desk.

In the process of organizing, I kept finding bits of ideas come and gone. Custom stickers for value added “Aji Vinegar” we made once after a pepper bumper crop, stickers for a packaged salad scheme that never took off. My journey in farm entrepreneurship has been a series of trial and error.

We have constantly tried to address making local food accessible. I see so many cars drive by our Farm Stand each day and often have conversations with people who “drove by 1,000 times”. It seems that for every 100 cars to roll past, we might get one customer.

I get it, our Farm Stand can only provide so many products, and we compete with same day delivery from huge grocery chains running on paper thin margins. The inconvenience factor is real making our farm shop more of a novelty than frequent stop.

In the same vein, a CSA puts a heavy upfront cost on the customer. Not everybody who wants a share has the several hundred dollars to invest upfront. Not everybody can make it to a weekly farmers market.

So, we set our minds to addressing these problems. How can we get local food more accessible both through location and price?

Enter the Farmer’s Choice Box

We are super excited to announce a new offering: the Farmer’s Choice Box. It will function much like a traditional CSA. Each week customers will receive an assortment of the freshest peak season produce from the farm with 2 new levels of convenience.

Small Box Example (approx. June): Large Salad Bag, Rainbow Chard Bunch, Bunch Carrots, Bunch Spring Onion, Cherry Tomato Pint, Bunch Italian Basil

1. Unlike a traditional, pay upfront, CSA these boxes have to ability to be charged weekly! No more upfront cost! Like a subscription to your favorite streaming platform, or farmer’s Substack blog, you will be billed weekly for your purchase. (You can also pay ahead 22 weeks for the season and receive a discount). Going out of town? Pause your subscription. Easy.

2. Produce delivered closer to your home! We have partnered with several local businesses to provide pick up points throughout town and we are continuing to add more pick-up spots. If you would like to become a spot, please reach out to info@folksfarmandseed.com. Pick-ups are set to happen every Wednesday 1pm-close once the program begins June 3rd.

Purchasing your first week as a deposit helps us gather information for how many shares we can expect and to which locations.

This is just the beginning. We are very hopeful this venture will increase local food in people’s bellies, support more year-round production, and encourage collaboration in the agricultural community.

Now, back to everything it takes to bring a small farm to life. Thanks Folks.