Category: Farm/Country Living

Direct Sales or Distribution?

It’s an article of faith these days that selling your farm products directly to the consumer is the only way to go. Ah, if it were only that simple!

The nice thing about selling direct is that face-to-face sales build trust and loyalty, provides direct feedback, and eliminates the middleman, allowing you to keep all the money. All well and good, but it’s awfully labor-intensive, especially if you live a long way from your customers. Farms, you have probably noticed, are way out in the country, and you’re a long way from your neighbors, let alone your customers.

We started with direct sales of free-range eggs at the farmer’s market, then added a couple of local supermarkets. A farmer’s market takes about seven hours, including travel time. To deliver to three local stores takes us about two hours. Each channel gets about half our output.

Obviously, it would be a lot easier to add a couple more stores than farmer’s markets, and stores are open year-round, while farmer’s markets aren’t.

Wholesale prices in our neck of the woods run about 2/3 to 3/4 of retail prices, so eggs that retail for $4.00 bring $2.67 – $3.00. Because it takes less time to stock a supermarket than attend a farmer’s market, selling to stores often give you a higher hourly return in spite of the lower prices.

I’ve never sold through distribution, but I knew a guy who did. He had 1,200 free-range hens and sold all his output to high-class restaurants in Portland, 90 minutes away. After a while, he signed up a distributor to handle his eggs, picking them up at the farm and delivering them to his customers. Because the distributor was already headed that way and already handled most of these accounts with their other products, they could do this very cheaply. Time-consuming trips to Portland were thus eliminated, freeing up time for farming and living.

The fact is that high-grade produce grown in small quantities simply doesn’t make it into big cities. It’s all snapped up by gourmets in the nearest large town. It doesn’t start spilling over into big cities until production exceeds what the closer towns can handle.

Of course, big cities are where most of the money is, so overcoming distribution issues is one path to higher profits. Distribution is nothing to sneeze at. Another possibility is direct sales via mail-order. This is a problem with eggs, since they’re fragile, but is practical with other products. The main issue is that the product needs to have a high value per pound (so shipping doesn’t dominate the costs) and be of extremely high quality, so gourmets will make it worth your while. And the gourmets have to find out that it exists, too, one way or another.

Water Well Woes

You won’t believe how little water our well gives us — one quart a minute. That’s 440 gallons a day, which is enough if we don’t want to water the lawn with it. We have a 1500-gallon tank (these things are surprisingly affordable and lightweight black plastic affairs that a single person can roll off a trailer and into place), so we have plenty of water, until we run out.

We didn’t run out, but it started smelling bad. This is the other bad thing about wells in Oregon’s Coast Range — sulfur in the water, and the sulfur-loving bacteria that go with it. Not a health hazard, but unaesthetic.

So we mixed a jug of bleach with a bucket of water and poured it down the well, and followed it with some vinegar. Recirculate lightly every half hour (the pump is on a timer), wait 24 hours, and pump the well dry. It’s called shock chlorination. If you have a well, you probably know all about it.

Yuck! Not only did we get the usual greenish-brownish gunk, but some reddish stuff as well. That’s too many colors for something that’s supposed to be crystal clear!

No doubt everything will return to normal again. It always has. I’d fire my water company, except it’s me.

What’s the Difference Between Brown and White Eggs?

In the bad old days, eggs in the big cities mostly came from the Midwest. Farmers would collect eggs and leave them, unrefrigerated, until they felt like going into town. They’d sell the eggs at the general store or the feed store, and the merchant would hold them, unrefrigerated, until he had a large enough lot to ship to an egg wholesaler.

The eggs would work their way towards the city, unrefrigerated, by slow freight. Eventually, they’d arrive in the store, where they would be set out, unrefrigerated, for the consumer.

This method was so horrendous that, in the summer, baby chicks would hatch during shipment! In the South, particularly, many people simply didn’t eat eggs in the summer.

By the way, the traditional American farm breeds all lay brown eggs.

There was a good market for reliably fresh eggs. Such eggs needed a short distribution chain so there wasn’t time for anything bad to happen between farm and consumer. The solution was to raise them on farms close to town. Land close to town is expensive, so the tendency was to crowd the hens and use breeds that tolerated crowding well. This was usually the White Leghorn, which was everybody’s favorite chicken for non-free-range uses, including coops on sailing ships. Leghorns lay white eggs.

So white eggs quickly came to mean “fancy eggs,” while brown eggs meant, “plain old farm eggs.” If you lived in farm country, where it’s easy to obtain fresh eggs because of the short distribution path, you’d eat brown eggs and wonder why anybody ever bothered with those sissy white eggs. If you lived in a big city, it would be just the opposite.

Another advantage of white eggs is that they show stains easily, meaning that snowy white eggs are a reliable sign that you are taking pains to produce a first-class product. On the general farm, it was awfully hard to produce eggs that clean, but brown-shelled eggs could hide the problem pretty well.

It took a long time for refrigeration to level the playing field. A lot of eggs were still moving by unrefrigerated freight in the Fifties. It’s this lack of quality control and freshness, not lower costs, that allowed factory-farmed eggs to take over. The guys with the refrigerators won because they never gave you a hideous surprise.

These days, almost everyone refrigerates their eggs from start to finish, except a few hippie-dippy producers who think that their political correctness shields them from the need to worry about quality. The reasons that white eggs were considered superior no longer apply. But the preference lingers. Let’s face it: eggs don’t have a lot of mindshare with most people, so they buy whatever they were used to growing up.

I Love Farmers’ Markets

When I was a kid, my parents owned a campground nestled into a redwood forest. This gave me a pleasant outdoor summer job every year, which was great. But the best thing was the customers. By the time they got here, most campers were at least two days into their trip and had left most of their stress behind. A beautiful, quiet setting and the knowledge that they were hundreds of miles away from their troubles put them into a great mood. It was a pleasure dealing with them.

The local farmers’ markets are just the same. They’re full of happy strolling shoppers who are enjoying a little time off from the stress of their day, ready to please and be pleased. It’s life-affirming for all involved.

You can heighten the experience even more by giving yourself extra opportunities to slow down and enjoy your outing. Put a cooler and some blue ice in the back of your car so you don’t have to race home with your produce. Have a leisurely lunch instead! And while you’re out and about, go to a couple of places you don’t need to go to.

It’s June, and we’re into the strawberry season. Don’t let it pass you by! The better farmers’ markets have strawberries to die for, not the fakey stuff in the supermarket.

Happy shopping!

Hooray! The Regular Farmers’ Market Season Has Begun!

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional opener for farmers’ markets. Here in the Corvallis area, we open about six weeks earlier than that, but still, there’s a big upsurge in both customers and vendors over Memorial Day.

Saturday’s market was a tremendous success, with swarms of people taking a relaxed amble through the market on a beautiful spring morning. The Corvallis Saturday Farmer’s Market is set in Corvallis’ Riverfront Park, which is a wonderful setting, at the edge of Corvallis’ old-fashioned downtown.

The market gets better every year. Anchored by a few organic farmers who have been perfecting their craft over the past thirty years, and filled in with almost every kind of home-grown product imaginable, quality is always king. And while people in Oregon are almost ridiculously nice in general, at the market these things are raised to a new level in both customers and vendors. It’s what Saturday mornings in small-town America are supposed to be.

Some farmers’ markets are little more than craft shows in disguise, or feature supermarket-style product in a different venue, but this is the real deal. All the goods have to be things that were raised on your own farm. They don’t all have to be edible or anything — beeswax candles where the wax came from your own hives is perfectly okay — but it has to be local.

Interestingly, organic certification is losing its punch. There’s too much low-quality organic stuff out there these days, and every new purveyor of low-quality wares, lowers the value of the label for everyone.

(Not that I’ve ever been organically certified. One of my rules is, “I won’t join any organization that wants me to fill out more than two sheets of paper per lifetime.”)

If you haven’t been to a farmers’ market lately, give it a whirl. Try all the ones within range, because they very widely. It’s especially good if you attend in a lazy, “It’s Saturday and I’ve got all day” frame of mind. Throw a cooler into the back of the car so you can have lunch instead of rushing home with your purchases. Do a couple of liesurely, unnecessary things before you go. You’ll live longer.