Lucknow Farms

Farmers' Markets Need Advertising for Buyers

I have visited and observed several farmers' markets, Union Square in Manhattan, civic center in Riverside, California, and downtown, Lewisburg, West Virginia. They have vibrant market centers, filled with fresh produce and dairy, looking delicious, and enticing. But they have all lacked a marketing context for me, the buyer and consumer. Few of the farm vendors had printed information about their farm. The few farmers who did distribute information did not tell more than the location of the farm, what kind of agriculture it practiced, e.g., organic or natural, and that it was a family operated enterprise, if it was. No vending stall had photographs of the farmstead and its farming work and its farmers. The lack of such a context was as confusing, as much a barrier to buyer interest and sales, as if a car buyer stumbled across a car lot with new cars that had no manufacturer brands on the cars, no information about the models, and no statistics about the vehicles. We can well imagine that few buyers would purchase the cars.

The farmers at the local farmers' markets need to embed the marketing of their products and produce within a story about themselves, their farms, and their farm work. (See my discussion of marketing of rural countryside for more on this topic.) I understand that farmers will not easily find the time to prepare a Powerpoint slide show for projection on a screen in their Easy-Up tented vending stall. But they need to understand the necessity for a story about themselves to invite, to entice, and to educate the buyer.

A slide show should stand in for the conversation that an interested buyer would have with an interested farmer. If they have the time to talk to buyers about what they are selling, week after week, then they have the time to prepare a slide show and set it up to run on a monitor in the stall. Buyers would want to know the farmer's name and the name of the farm, how the farmer got into farming in the first place, what their philosophy of farming is, and something about their agricultural practices. The buyers would want the sort of information they could talk to other persons about. Happy gossip, if you will. The vendors at the local farmers' market should not assume that all buyers are local or are fully knowledgeable about the farm. They should not assume that buyers, who know something about the farmer, would not want to be updated about what happened over the past year.

Local food is part of a larger story about America. Farmers need to market their wares within the context of this story. The initial effort might require some time, and perhaps some technical assistance, but is necessary to expand the market to new buyers and to a new marketing territory.

West Virginia Farm and Chef Collaborative

http://www.wvfarm2u.org/

US Food Purveyors Turn to Private European Food Import Standards

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., "said last month it would buy produce, meat and seafood only form suppliers accredited by private-inspection offices." The reference is to European (or European style) private food inspectors created and sponsored by cooperation of large food importors. The WSJ points out that Europe is the world's largest food importer, $20 billion last year. (John W. Miller, "Private Food Standards Gain Favor: Wal-Mart, McDonald's Adopt Europoean Safety Guidelines," The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, March 11, 2008, B1.)

"The biggest such regulator, GlobalGap, now counts 81,000 farms and plants in 76 countries as members, up from 18,000 in 2004. The Cologne, Germany-based group expects to reach 100,000 this year, says director Kristian Möller."

McDonalds and Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. also contract with GlobalGap.

One attraction of private inspection is that it responds more quickly than national government inspection systems, such as the USDA and the EU, to new challenges to food safety and to changing consumer sentiments. GlobalGap is now large enough, in its indirect purchasing power, to force environmental changes on farmers, such as pesticide registration and limiting environmental emissions, in countries without such national regulations. It can also compel shippers and distributors to utilize tracking systems for food products.

Because the costs are high for farmers to meet GlobalGap's requirements, to date mostly large farms have been involved. But this practical locking out of small farms has forced small farmers to create cooperative organizations to share capital and costs.

Burger King Buys Cage Free Eggs and Pork

Burger King, the fast food restaurant chain, has committed to purchasing 10% of its pork from suppliers that do not use sow-gestation crates (which confine the sow to extremely tight quarters) and 2% of its eggs from hens not confined to cages. It expects both percentages to double by the end of 2007. (Wall Street Journal, print edition, Thursday, March 219, 2007, B4, reporting an Associated Press story about a letter received by PETA from BK.) (Also, here with Internet links.)

Some critics note that cage-free and free-range farming do not necessarily produce the highest quality animal welfare on the farm.

Institutional Contracts Would Support Local Farming

Institutional contracts, as between colleges and public school systems and local farmers would go a long way to supporting local farming. This AP article, "More College Kids Eating Local Farm Fare", discusses several such contracts in New York and the Northeast. Another benefit of the contracts for consumers of the food is that the produce and meats are fresher and have better flavor than food imported from out of the region or out of the country.

Perhaps the next step should be collective labor contracts, so that local teenagers learn about work while providing the labor the farmers need to fulfill the contracts.

Religious Ritual and Slaughter Methods

One of the volatile issues facing farming springs out of the confrontation of animal rights and traditional farming and slaughter methods. I class the animal rights in a larger category of urban sensibilities. Most Western people have never lived close to animals, been on farms, or observed slaughter of animals for food. They might enjoy meat, for instance, but are disassociated from the blood and guts of slaughter by the supermarket, which wraps meats in plastic. I call the position of the urban meat consumer a "sensibility", because it is largely a matter of emotional naivete, as is revealed by the emotional shock and (usually) repulsion consumers feel when they first observe slaughter (as in a documentary movie or a visit to farm or slaughter house).

The most extreme positions of the confrontation are occupied by the animal rights vegetarians, at one pole, and the practitioners of religious and ritualistic slaughter on the other. (I have dealt with the issue of slaughter methods here.)

A recent article in the Jerusalem Post, "Chicken ritual is foul, animal rights groups say", illustrates the repulsion felt by the urban sensibility in the face of use of animals in religious ritual and ritual slaughter. The presence of this sensibility in Israel might surprise, but it should not. While Israel has large Orthodox Jewish and Muslim populations that practice religious preparation and consumption of food, the nation also contains an equally large modern, secular society, centered in Tel Aviv, the largest city. Tel Aviv is, as it is characterized by the Post, anyway, a Western city similar in culture and attitudes to New York, London, and Paris.

The Jerusalem Post article (above) is well worth reading for its full display of the emotional revulsion and opposition of the urban sensibility to the traditional culture along side it.