1 Quality
2 Price
3 Convenience
My business Mentor taught me these three things in the spring of 2012. He said: “You can build a business if you have two of these things. If you can figure out a way to have all three you will definitely be a success”. I have learned the truth and value of this advice. Being in the food business people demand all three.
We produced a lot of good food directly from “my garden to your table” It was rewarding, clean, tasty, fresh, nutritious, better than organic because we didn’t use any of those weird “organic compliable” potions that many of the certified organic farms are certified to use. Quality is everything on our farm. Because of our strict policies to be as natural as possible we endured many problems that commercial farms protect their crops from with fumigants, sprays, and dusts (yes… even the organic certified ones)
We generally had quality but once in a while we had something somebody didn’t like and of course the word got to everybody and somehow we were the last to know. Food is a tough, often thankless business.
Price is an issue. It is not cheap to grow food. Land is expensive to own, purchase, or rent. I hear of people borrowing plots of land but it can take a decade to develop a farm like our project so borrowing is usually out of the question. We add up the cost of living for a farm family, land rental or payments, electricity, irrigation, seed, fertilizer, fuel, equipment, vet bills, feed, taxes, and an emergency fund. We subtract this from the expected saleable harvest and factor in the competitive prices at the grocery store. This tells us if we are in business. In our Oregon project the price had to be high in order to meet these needs. Our market research told us that we could charge these prices but the majority of the people we attracted were unable to sustain this for a long period.
There is nothing convenient about belonging to a farm to get your food. This is a game for the die hard, the true grit, the deeply dedicated, the health conscience, and the very sick. It is simply not convenient! This was another struggle. The reality of going to a farm weekly to get food is a romantic notion that looses its nostalgia when the stress of time, money, and crop seasonality lasts for extended periods.
Quality was fine, price was high, convenience did not exist. I built a business that had good food at a high price that people could not get. Some people could get it but not enough to sustain the business. To fix the inconvenience I had to raise my prices to pay for delivery. So then I was delivering good food that was too high priced.
These have always been serious issues with small agricultural ventures. The industry has sacrificed quality for convenience to ensure a food supply to the public. In so doing the scale of efficiency has brought the price of food into a range that is affordable to all. Now there are issues with nutrients and toxins in this industry advancement. The forms to correct low nutrition and high toxicity in our current foods system apparently still needs to conform within the realm of quality, price, and convenience.
The answer has always been the same though hard for civilized man to truly embrace: Grow as much food as you can on your own land. This message has been handed down from Hesiod to Virgil to Thomas Jefferson, Sir Albert Howard, J.I. Rodale, Wendell Berry, Victor Davis Hanson, and many others. The genius of the modern entrepreneur will be to do this while in pursuit of their career. Imagine a community of families building businesses that uplift all aspects of each others lives while being fed the benefits of their individual husbandry pursuits from their own small plot of land.
