2pgs, The Internet is a communication and marketing tool that can provide exposure to a large number of potential customers. The Internet can be used to advertise your farm with pictures and maps, take orders online, show product availability, keep in touch with your existing customers, and support other ways of selling, such as CSAs or farmers markets. Farmers can have an Internet presence through their own website or by using a website run by a third party.
10pgs, Why farmers are increasingly banding together to take their products online, targeting consumers directly without the fuss of a physical market.
9 pages, Financial performance benchmarks were estimated on the basis of samples of successful Northeast fruit and vegetable producers classified by primary local foods market channel. Comparisons across farm stores, large urban farmers' markets, and intermediated market channels were conducted for the purpose of identifying key differences in human and financial resource requirements. The benchmarks provide data useful for assisting individual farmers in assessing their performances and new and beginning farmers in identifying appropriate market channels for their businesses. Additionally, the benchmarks provide a rich source of information for use by Extension educators in developing programming around local foods marketing opportunities and business planning.
24 pages, Drawing from fieldwork of 14 small food farms in the Midwest, we describe the on-the-ground, practical challenges of doing and communicating sustainability when local food production is not well-supported. We illustrate how farmers enact learned and honed tactics of sustainability at key sites such as farmers' markets and the Internet with consumers. These tactics reveal tensions with dominant discourse from government, Big Ag, and popular culture. The success of these tactics depends on farmers having fortitude--control, resilience, and the wherewithal to be exemplars of sustainability. In our discussion, we highlight how the local farmers' social movement work constitutes loosely organized small groups connecting others to an amorphous idea of a sustainable society--one that sustains an environmental, economic, local, cultural, and physical way of life. Using Fine's concept of tiny publics, we identify design opportunities for supporting this less directed kind of social movement.
5pgs, This time of year, fresh produce production is abundant in most U.S. states, with the North arriving to the party little later than those below the Mason Dixon line.
While retailers know how to source, merchandise and market locally grown programs, engaging consumers in a locally grown program can prove to be trickier than in the past. But there are a lot of opportunities.
