Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for January 29

I made it back from Chattanooga a couple hours ago, where a thousand sustainable farmers and other like minded folks gathered for the annual SSAWG conference. I was on the conference staff, which meant fifteen hour work days and didn’t get to go to most of the actual sessions, but it was totally worth it. Just getting to be around so many people trying to do the same things you are, and getting to talk with them in the halls and over meals, makes it an invaluable experience.

I’m exhausted, though, and just barely stayed awake long enough to get the site open for you. There are over 300 items available this week, including some new radishes, many carrots, and a special offer on Jerusalem Artichokes. Jim over at Jim’s Farm needed to move his bed of these sunflower relatives, and he has a good number of the tubers he just didn’t have room for and thus must be eaten by you. If you’ve never tried these, which can be used like a potato (mashed, roasted) or like a water chestnut (sliced and stir fried or eaten raw), now is the perfect opportunity. You’d be hard pressed to find these in a regular grocery store, and once you’ve tasted them you’ll wonder why.

Thanks for all your support! I know there were a few little glitches last week, but the market volunteers did a great job keeping things going while I was gone. We’ll see you all again this Thursday from 4:30pm to 8pm at the old state farmers market on Broad Street.

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for January 22

A couple weeks ago, I promised I’d get into the details of how the market sustains itself financially. Many of you have asked about that, and I’m happy to oblige.

First off, we’re legally a sole proprietorship, and the market is just an extension of my wife’s and my small farm. We file a Schedule F in addition to our regular tax forms. When the market started in 2002, it was named “Locally Grown Cooperative”, but it was never legally organized as a co-op. Dan & Kris Miller, the founders, were always sure to run things in a cooperative spirit, and when they handed the business to my wife and I in 2004, we’ve tried to do the same thing. I’ve renamed it to “Athens Locally Grown”, but you’ll still hear a number of people refer to us as “the co-op”.

We’re not a non-profit, either, but we’ve structured things so that over time the market can cover its own expenses. When things are good, it covers ours too. Just like all of our member farms are sustainable growers, the market itself needs to be sustainable. I mentioned last week that I thought we’d fall short this year, and on paper we did, just a little. The cash flow was just right, though, and we have the same amount in the cash box as we started 2008. My wife and I do not get paid, but if the market were to turn a profit, that’d show up on our personal tax forms. I was ok with it even if the loss on paper had been a lot larger, because we had unusual expenses last year. We bought quite a few new coolers (at about $100 each), all the lights we needed after we moved locations, some improvements to the truck, and so forth. We shouldn’t have so many expenses like that this year.

So how does the market cover its expenses? One small way is through the memberships you pay. The $25 a year you give to the market is enough (to put it bluntly) to cover the costs of having you as a customer: banking fees from depositing your checks, paper and ink for printing invoices, web hosting fees, and that sort of thing. What’s left over goes to helping fund farm tours, food donations to like-minded area groups and events, etc. We currently have 506 paid members out of the almost 1600 accounts on the website.

By far the bulk of our funding comes from the growers themselves. They generally pay a 10% commission on their sales through the site. This money covers the many coolers we use, the tables and cots used to spread out and organize your orders, the truck we bought at the end of 2007, gasoline, the food allowance we offer our volunteers, etc. During the winter, the sales are not enough to cover our weekly costs, but in the summertime there is extra. Last year, it pretty much all evened out in the end.

The growers get paid out of the shared cashbox when they drop off their sales, during the hour before we open the market. Then, you arrive and pay into the cashbox for our order. We then rush to the bank to deposit the money to cover the checks we just wrote to the growers. As explained elsewhere on the website, you are really ordering directly from and paying the growers yourself, but our shared cashbox system makes things convenient for you and them. (Imagine if you ordered from ten growers having to write ten checks when you picked up your items!) This shared cashbox system has so far satisfied the tax man, but it does mean that if you place an order and then never arrive to pick it up, we’re left holding the bag. For that reason, you are responsible for paying for orders not picked up, and that amount is automatically added on to your next order for your convenience. Last year, there was about $700 of produce ordered but never picked up and then never paid for at all (or paid for with bad checks). That might seem like a lot (and it is), but considering that the market had $308,000 in sales total, that’s not much at all. In fact, it’s less than a tenth of the US retail industry’s “shrinkage” rate.

So, in probably far too much detail, that’s how we operate. Our market might be more expensive to run than a traditional “booths and tables” farmers market, but that price buys a system that’s simple, time-saving, flexible, and in my opinion, just better. There’s no money in the bank, but the market is paying for itself, and that’s all I could ask for.

Now, on to the food! My wife and I will be in Tennessee this week for the SSAWG conference, but the market will go on as normal, thanks to my wonderful volunteer crew of workers and Michael McMullan (of McMullan Family Farm), who will be making the dairy run. They’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old state farmers market on Broad Street. Thanks from all of us for all of your support!

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for January 15

I was going to talk today about the finances of Athens Locally Grown, but I haven’t finished the books for 2008 yet. It looks like we were a couple thousand dollars short of breaking even, but I’ll know for sure later on and will have a full report then.

In the mean time, I’ve been preparing for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group’s conference next week in Chattanooga. I’m on the conference staff, in charge of all the computers and projectors used in the many presentation rooms, and that’ll keep me busy. I’ll also be getting together with market managers and growers from the many other communities using my locallygrown.net model (39 now up and running and another 13 getting underway), and I’m looking forward to that.

The conference runs from Wednesday through Sunday next week, but even though I’ll be gone, Athens Locally Grown will be up and running, thanks to our weekly volunteers and Michael McMullan (who’ll be going to pick up the milk).

I see a few new items this week, including the first new onions. Onions get planted in the fall here, and now is the time to thin the rows, and those thinnings provide you with green onions. We are coming into the coldest time of the year, though, so our availability will be more unpredictable than usual for the next few weeks.

Thanks again for all your support! We’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old farmers market on Broad Street.

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for January 8

As we start our eighth year at Athens Locally Grown, I’m going to take the next few weeks to discuss the hows and whys of ALG. We’ve come a long way from the first half-dozen farmers putting together boxes for the couple dozen customers out at Heirloom Organics in Winterville. Three of those first growers are still with us, as are many of those first customers, but now we’re approaching seventy growers and two thousand customers. I’ve worked hard to keep the spirit of cooperation intact even as we’ve grown, but in the convenience of our system the reasons for why we do what we do sometimes get glossed over.

This week, I’m going to talk about the many legal issues surrounding our market. Even though many people call us “the co-op”, ALG is legally an extension of my wife’s and my vegetable farm. There’s no board of directors, no shield corporation, no pot of grant money. It’s just us, and while that keeps things very simple, it also exposes my family to a ton of liability.

Some of you have sent me news items about the raid last month by armed law enforcement officers (some have described it as a SWAT raid, but it wasn’t quite that bad) on the home of John and Jacqueline Stowers, who run the Manna Storehouse, an organic food co-op in Ohio not too dissimilar from Athens Locally Grown. You can watch the Stowers tell their side of the story, or read news accounts, or read lots of web chatter about it. However it all plays out in court, undisputed is the entire family (including children) were held at gunpoint for hours while their house was searched and food and computers were seized. I’m doing my best to avoid having the same thing happen to my family, and there are several things we do specifically toward that end:

• The growers list their own items and set their own prices. When you buy from them, it is from them, not from me, and not from Athens Locally Grown.
• Athens Locally Grown never takes ownership of the food. The growers drop it off, and you pick it up.
• The raw milk is a little different, since by federal law the dairies in South Carolina are not allowed to bring their milk into Georgia. In this case, the price for milk on the site includes a separate amount you pay us to go pick up your milk for you.
• Everything at the market has a customer’s name attached to it. ALG does not repackage any items.
• When you pay, you’re paying into a shared cash box for all of the growers. This lets you write a single check for convenience, but you are really paying all of the growers directly.
• The growers give a percentage of their sales back to the market to cover the expenses of keeping the market going. I’ll cover finances another week.
• ALG never buys from a grower and resells the items to you. Never.
• When a grower sells items that need licenses from either the state or the federal government, ALG verifies that the proper licenses have been obtained.

The ownership issue is key. It’s one of the reasons why we can’t deliver, and why we usually can’t hold items for you if you aren’t able to pick up your orders. That might be a good business for someone, but it’s not at all what I want to be into. Many food coops and even some farmers markets aren’t as careful with that as I try to be, and indications are that’s what got the Manna Storehouse into trouble. There are so many grey areas in all this, and the regulations don’t even consider that something like Athens Locally Grown might exist. We’re firmly in the grey areas with most everything we do that it’s just too risky for me to bring us into the areas that are clearly black.

So, these are the sorts of things that guide my thinking as Locally Grown has grown over the years. Everything we do has legal ramifications, and the state of Georgia has a reputation for being no nonsense when it comes to enforcement. I’m not a lawyer, but every time we enter those grey areas, I make sure we follow the intent of the laws, don’t flaunt anything, and have a good defense and a paper trail should we need it.

On that note, let’s get on to the food! The bakers have returned from their holidays, and the cold has bitten back some of the greens, but apart from that the list looks much like last week. January and February tend to be hard months to grow anything, even in greenhouses, so we’re likely to see the variety dip a bit in coming weeks. It won’t be too long, though, now that the days are slowly getting longer, that we’ll start seeing the spring goodies come back.

Thanks for all of your support. If it wasn’t for your desire to eat freshly harvested, locally grown food, we wouldn’t be here at all. We’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old state farmers market on Broad Street!

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for January 1

I hope the last two weeks have been good to you. I’m still a couple hours from home, completing a nice visit with family in Florida. No need for you to wait on me, though, so I’ll go ahead and open the market now.

I did see a few new items this week, including diced bell peppers and sliced squash from Backyard Harvest, all harvested at the peak of their season and then hand processed and frozen in their on-farm certified kitchen. Georgia makes it more difficult than many other states for growers to get you preserved items, and I’m glad that Boo & Becky at Backyard Harvest was able to navigate the system and, on their own, build an acceptable facility.

Even though Thursday is New Year’s Day, we are operating on our normal schedule. We don’t have another week off on the calendar until Thanksgiving next year, in fact.

Thank you all for your constant support, and Happy New Year! I know some of you have just discovered us, but 2009 will be Athens Locally Grown’s eigth year, and we wouldn’t be here without you. We’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old state farmers market on Broad Street.

Athens Locally Grown:  Closed for the Holidays!

This is just a reminder that Athens Locally Grown is closed this week in observance of the multitude of holidays occurring.

We will reopen next week, with pickup during the regular times on New Year’s Day.

All the best to you and yours!

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for December 18

I’m not sure where the time went, but this Thursday will be the last pickup day for 2008. We’ll be off next week for Christmas, but we will return the following week with pickup on New Year’s Day.

There are only a “mere” 400 items to choose from this week, but I do see a few new items on the carousel. It has been a good growing season so far this fall, and all of the growers who keep going year round (and those who do do so largely due to you all sticking with us even after the tomatoes go away) are still planting more. It’s the tail end of the garlic and onion planting season, and we’re coming into time to plant broccoli, cauliflower, and head cabbages for an early spring harvest. The lettuces and salad mixes get planted pretty much every other week from here on out as well. It is risky, since an ice storm or two can wipe out a couple months of hard work, but the rewards are the beautiful produce we have available now, produce that hasn’t been shipped here from thousand miles away.

A few of you have asked about our dairy schedule for the holiday. This week we’ll pick up your orders from Cows R Us dairy, and next week we’ll be off, and the week after we’ll visit Milky Way and Split Creek dairies. We’ll then alternate weekly, as we normally do, from there.

Some of you have also expressed interest in expanding your existing organic gardens and joining the other growers here at Athens Locally Grown. We actively encourage this, since there is no way our community can be food-independent without a lot more growers. And this market’s operations makes it easy to get started. If this interests you at all, please check out the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, also known as SSAWG. Their annual conference is in January in Chattanooga, and is one of the best investments a grower can make. The Georgia Organics conference is in March in Atlanta, and though a lot smaller than the SSAWG conference, it is also worth attending. Details about both conferences can be found on their websites.

Thank you all for your continued support, and whatever holidays you celebrate this season (we celebrate most all of them around here), peace and love to you and yours. We’ll see you this Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old farmers market on Broad Street!

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for December 11

People eat locally for many reasons, but one great reason is keeping the money they spend on food circulating locally rather than fly off to Bentonville, Arkansas or Cincinnati, Ohio (the headquarters of Wal-Mart and Kroger, respectively). Money spent locally tends to get re-spent locally, and this multiplying effect is what drives a healthy economy (local or otherwise). This is especially important in economic times such as these.

I bring this up to highlight a sister organization to ours, Athens Locally Crafted. This group of artisans make some stunningly great items, and they’ve got a website that works pretty much exactly like ours over at athens.locallycrafted.net. This Thursday, they’ll also be sharing our space to hold a good old fashioned craft fair. Not everything you’ll find on the website will be there in person, but you’ll have an opportunity to pick up plenty of items for your gift giving list (or a little something for yourself).

We’re also expecting 1000 Faces to have their farmers market stand set up, which means there’ll be freshly brewed 1000 Faces coffee to warm you up while you look over the tables.

On our end, we’ve got over 450 items this week. There are a couple new items, and a good many that were added last week. I hesitate to mention them because they are so good I’m tempted to just keep them for myself, but be sure to look at the heirloom chinese cabbage from Lazy Willow Farm and the dried beans from Backyard Harvest. We’ve had beans and cabbage before, but these new items from both farms really raise the standard for the rest of us.

This is also the last trip to Split Creek Farm and Milky Way Dairy before Christmas, so if you need cheeses, fudge, or cream for Christmas, it needs to be ordered this week!

Thanks for all of your support, and for keeping your shopping dollars local! We’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old farmers market on Broad Street.

Athens Locally Grown:  Availability for December 4

Welcome back from our Thanksgiving hiatus! We have one more week off planned for Christmas week, but until then we’re back open.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. I’m writing this from I24 somewhere in middle Tennessee while my wife drives us back from a few days with my family in Missouri. We only get up there once a yet at best, and we had a really nice visit.

There is some exciting news to report this week. We have had three South Carolina dairies offering Grade A Unpasteurized milk for some time, but without getting into the whole raw milk debate, I know there are a good number of you for whom raw milk is not an option. Enter Johnston Family Dairy from Morgan County, Georgia. They have just opened their on-farm Grade A low-heat pastuerization facility and are now offering their milk from pastured Jersey cows through Athens Locally Grown. They have a great website of their own, which you can find linked to on their info page on our “Our Growers” section.

There a great many other new products, including a new egg producer, but since I’m writing this on my cell phone, I’ll leave it to you to find them on the “New Products” carousel. Thanks so much for your continued support, and special thanks to those of you who wrote me to tell of how Athens Locally Grown fit into your Thanksgiving celebrations. That meant a lot to me. Also, thanks to all of you fpr your patience at our last pickup. Our two largeat deliveries arrived late, throwing everything akimbo, and making some of you wait much longer than normal Thanks to your patience and a few membets who jumped in to fill orders, we finally did get caugjt up. We’ll see you Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at the old farmers market on Broad Street!

Athens Locally Grown:  Athens Locally Grown Closed for Thanksgiving

This is just one last reminder that we’re closed next week for Thanksgiving. I hope you have a happy one!

I also forgot to mention that Split Creek Dairy is having their fall open house tomorrow from 11am to 4pm. If you’ve already eaten the fudge you were hoping to save for your Thanksgiving dessert tray, it’s not too late to zip up there and get some more. They’re off I85, just inside South Carolina as you pass over the mud flat that used to be Lake Hartwell. You can find more information at their website.