Food for Thought

New York and the Northeast leads the way in direct farm sales.

As the above info-graphic from the USDA shows, in 2020 the Northeast had the highest percentage of farms that are selling direct to customers (patrons).

Not a lot of folks know this. See the full document here.

Selling local food direct to a supportive community of eaters means less food miles traveled and less fossil fuels expended. But it also means more income going directly to the farmers and fresher produce and foods going directly to your table.

Something that has always stuck in my craw is the word “consumer.”

A word that many organizations, especially in marketing and business analytics circles, use without meaningful consideration of the people and families their data sets identify. It is far too reductionist a word to describe our devoted community of locavores and breadheads.

This is not just a “farm to consumer” model as we see it, but a farm/food producer providing local food and a community that in turns supports and benefits from the efforts put into the soil and onto the hearth, in our case.

Word choices aside, there is one other facet of the graphic I find headscratching.

Local food is defined as being transported 400 miles or less. To put that into perspective, 400 miles from our farm is a 7 hour drive to Atlantic City, NJ.

I used to know of a veggie farm that drove from Keeseville to NYC, but that was by most accounts of the farms I know around here not very common and a terrifying slog most would avoid.

We’re extremely fortunate that the majority of our sales are within a 50 mile radius of the farm.

The fact that we are gainfully employed by serving a rural county of 15,000 year-round households is pretty astounding.

Hopefully this is a model we can continue to highlight, build on, educate and share with the next generation of land stewards at our farm.