Growing Crops and Community Ties: Both Help Bind a Business
Last autumn, when Liz Adler was eight months pregnant, she was still picking squash at the Easthampton, Mass., farm she runs with her husband. Adler, a former social worker, never thought about being a farmer until she met her future husband, Ben Perrault. He was a farmer, and as Adler got to know his work firsthand, she grew to like it. "It's scary and risky, but I feel really lucky," Adler says now of her new career. "I'm excited to raise our baby on a farm."
For decades, the idyllic family farm has been threatened by rising property prices and government subsidies to large-scale agribusiness. Now, though, thanks to a new business model called community-supported agriculture, more people like Adler and Perrault are selling crops for profit.
Small farms are harnessing the rising interest in locally grown food and using savvier marketing and management to stay afloat. Food-safety scares temporarily spur shoppers to explore supermarket alternatives, and they discover that buying produce from a nearby farmer feeds the soul as well as the belly, says Mark Lattanzi of Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, a nonprofit in South Deerfield, Mass. CISA has helped small farms with a "buy local" branding campaign, which alerts consumers to who sells local produce.
Perrault, 28, who worked at organic farms after high school, and Adler, 29, acquired a farm business two years ago after deciding that consumer interest in buying locally could help them succeed. The couple renamed it Mountain View Farm, because they believed the previous name, Ol' Turtle Farm, "didn't suit us as young, up-and-coming farmers," Adler says.
Community-supported agriculture cuts out the middleman, with shareholders paying in advance to receive produce directly from the farm as it becomes available over the course of a growing season. Born in Europe in the 1920s, community-supported agriculture took root in America in the 1980s in areas where farmland borders urban communities. In 2004, there were 1,700 community-supported farms, up from 60 in 1990. Small farms in western Massachusetts, like Mountain View, now bring in crops worth more than $100 million a year, according to CISA.
Basil and bugs. Mountain View's 430 members pay between $435 and $535 a season on a sliding income scale. Shareholders pay the full amount in the spring, so farmers don't have to take out loans upfront to invest in equipment and seeds. It's a win-win relationship: Customers pay less for fresh food, and farmers get some financial security. "Last year, our basil got eaten by bugs," Perrault says. "But customers got a lot of other herbs instead." Mountain View grows over 200 varieties of crops on 25 rented acres.
Members stop by the farm to fill up a shopping bag with freshly picked vegetables from June through October. They can picnic at the farm, explore nearby trails, and pick flowers and herbs. "We are selling something very intangible: a direct relationship to the farmer," Adler says.
Adler issues a weekly newsletter with recipes and information about the harvest. Members may "expect tomatoes to be perfectly round," Perrault says, "and we have to teach them about heirloom tomatoes, which are big and funny looking." Every September, members throw a potluck harvest festival to benefit Mountain View.
Perrault and Adler started selling shares to employees at a hospital in Springfield, Mass., last year. The farm delivers weekly food baskets to the shareholders at work. "There are a lot of families," Adler says, "who want their children to know that broccoli doesn't grow on a supermarket shelf."
This story appears in the June 25, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/070617/25smallbiz.htm
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