Small Farms, Long Drives
Every Saturday, Jacqui Coburn’s stall at the farmer’s market is piled high with a colorful selection of the bounty of Front Field Farms, her family-owned operation. This morning, she has three kinds of peppers, eggplants, okra, sweet potatoes and even purple dahlias. Coburn usually arrives before sunrise to set up the stall, but the real work actually starts much earlier — at 8 a.m. the morning before.
“We try to harvest as much as we can the day before so it’s as fresh as possible,” Coburn said. “We basically spend all day Friday harvesting, washing and packaging things for the market.”
Depending on the quantity of produce, harvesting could start up to two days before. On the day of the market, Coburn and her husband wake up at 4 a.m. to load their truck and travel to their markets. The markets end at about noon, and on the way back to the farm, they stop to make a few deliveries to local restaurants. By the time they get back to the farm, it’s about 3 p.m., but the day still isn’t over — leftover produce has to be unloaded and inventoried.
“We’re probably done with everything by maybe 4 or 4:30,” Coburn said. “That’s a long day.”
Now, multiply that day by three, and you have a good idea of what the week looks like for Coburn, her husband and her employees. Front Field Farms has stalls at not only the Wednesday and Friday Athens markets, but also two farmer’s markets in metro Atlanta. This round-trip totals more than 300 miles every week.
Long drives like Coburn’s aren’t unusual within the business. Without the volume of product to command sizeable markets like grocery stores, local farmers must take it upon themselves to get close to the consumer.
On the other end of the scale, large-scale farms like the Muranaka family’s in Oxnard, California, can afford to specialize and still command enormous markets. The Muranakas grow just one crop, and plenty of it. Their farm alone supplies about half of the green onions used in P.F. Chang’s restaurants.
Meanwhile, just a few states over, local farmers like Joe Ringhousen have to go the extra mile. In 2013, he told NPR that though he used to sell the products of his 80-acre apple farm to local wholesalers, the market had been cornered by “super hubs in Washington State and Michigan.” Ringhousen still thinks he can make it — but he’ll have to put his apples in more than one basket, such as trying to sell to superstores like Wal-Mart while also edging into farmer’s markets and local bakeries.
While contracts like this are difficult even for farms like Ringhousen’s to secure, it’s nearly impossible for farms like Coburn’s that are twenty times smaller.
Most of the time, small farms don’t have large enough economies of scale to take advantage of bigger markets like contracting. They can try to find niche markets like grocery co-ops, or big box stores that allow buying from local growers, but this drives up the transaction cost for retailers, which means lower net profits. Farmers like Coburn thus have to get creative to avoid spending all of their time on the road.
Front Field Farms is part of the Athens Collective Harvest, a community-supported agriculture organization that, among other services, provides weekly produce boxes to its members.
The Collective Harvest not only reduces their travel time, but also helps shift some of the uncertainty of agriculture away from the farmer. With farmers markets, the producer has all of the risk up to the point of sale, with the farmer taking the loss if all their produce isn’t sold. The Collective Harvest mitigates that risk, with customers paying upfront for a periodic box of product. If, for instance, a farm cannot produce its expected crop of parsley, the customers just won’t receive parsley that week.
Coburn has developed a system to sell most of the food she produces, but even with the Collective Harvest and restaurant sales, this doesn’t account for expansion.
“We’re still not depleting all the food that we grow,” she said. “We’re still looking for more outlets to sell [what] we’re growing.”
The act of expansion itself poses an unexpected problem.
“Most of the farms that have gone out of business are the medium size farms,” Benjamin Campbell, professor of agribusiness at the University of Georgia, said.
Campbell explained that small farms can command niche markets, like the aforementioned farmer’s markets, but only until they reach a certain size. At some point, they outgrow the niche markets but still lack the size to compete with large-range farms, such as those that provide produce to grocery stores. In addition to this, local farmers sometimes lack the business acumen that benefits their larger-scale counterparts.
“One of the biggest things we see that smaller farmers don’t do is understand the cost side of things,” he said.
He explains that small farms often don’t perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine if their markets are truly profitable. If it costs $20 to get there and they sell $15 worth of product, they’ve actually lost $5.
“Bigger farms understand that better and don’t harvest if they’re not going to make a profit,” Campbell said.
Hickory Hill is a rare example of a farm that seems to have hit its sweet spot. The eight-acre organic farm started out selling cherry and grape tomatoes to Whole Foods, but eventually diversified its venues.
“We kind of moved away from the monoculture of growing one crop of tomatoes, and just went into markets,” Josh Johns, co-owner of the farm, said. Hickory Hill sells at three farmers markets. One of these, the Freedom Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta, is open year-round and accounts for most of their sales, especially in the winter.
“They always take whatever we can give them,” Johns said.
Like Coburn, Johns also sells to a few restaurants. The profit margin is ultimately lower, but so is the required effort.
“For markets, presentation is like radishes in a pretty little bunch, or a bag of salad mix,” he said. In contrast, restaurant sales can be far less meticulous, with the added bonus of clearing an entire pallet in one go.
When one considers the distance that farm employees have to travel to get to the farm in the first place, the process seems even less efficient. Sarah Spradlin, a field hand at Hickory Hill Farm, drives thirty miles from her home in Athens to get to the farm. On market days, she travels to Athens with the produce, makes the trip back to the farm, unloads what produce hasn’t sold, then finally leaves for the day.
“It’s just a necessary evil if we want to connect people who aren’t farming with people who are,” Spradlin said.
Despite the toll they take on farmers, the markets are a better alternative than big-box sales. According to a 2014 report by Sylvia Cantor, farmers markets help the environment not only by “reducing transportation distances for people and food,” but also encouraging “environmentally sound farming practices.”
But this win for sustainability comes at a loss for farmers themselves. Until a solution is created, farmers like Johns and Coburn will have to continue trading the distance they travel for customer convenience.
