For What It’s Worth
How much money is a pepper worth?
Back in May, the one crop I had no doubt we would be swimming in by September was peppers. We planted tray after tray —definitely over 1,000 plants — of several varieties. Fast forward to September, and a herd of deer and bout of blossom end-rot has wreaked havoc on our entire pepper crop. It’s a bit shocking, and we barely have any peppers to sell at all. The above image shows a single plant with zero “sellable” peppers on it. Now imagine this multiplied by 1,000 and you may begin to form an idea of what this means to a small farm like ours.
It’s Saturday morning, and I (nikki, farmhand) am working the Zephyr Farm market stand in Providence. We have developed a detailed choreography that allows customers to purchase their produce without touching it. This keeps us and other customers safer by limiting the handling of the produce in our stand. One by one, customers pair off with workers and take a stroll down our lineup to see what’s fresh this week. It is a relished opportunity to socialize in our new socially distant paradigm.
This is really the place where the rubber meets the road for us. How will this week’s harvest land? Will the customers be as excited as we are by the new haul of carrots? Will they be as disappointed as we are in those scallions that didn’t quite grow into their full potential? Will they buy enough of this week’s bumper crop to save us from coming back to the farm and feeding the leftovers to the chickens? Are we offering our produce at a price that is fair and reasonable, both for our customers and for our finances? How do we even measure and compute that price point? Organic produce is not widgets. There are a lot of chaotic variables to consider.
I’m working with a couple of customers, moving down the line helping them select their produce. We come to the eggplants and I offer the different options based on size, shape, and color. It’s a little later on in the morning, and the eggplants that were the “most sellable” have already been sold. The customer questions the brown scars visible on the eggplant skins. I explain that they are sun scorched, a completely cosmetic issue that does not affect the taste of the flesh. It happens when the shade around the growing fruit is disrupted, either by removing nearby weeds or harvesting nearby fruit. “I’m sorry,” I say. “They aren’t perfect.” The customer replies, “Well for three dollars a pound, they ought to be.”
Before I had this job, I might have said something similar if I were the customer in that moment. Here are some insights that now give me pause to contemplate the value of growing food locally and organically…
It takes one worker
2-3 hours to weed a single bed on hands and knees —
no chemicals!
Our fall planting of carrots is 15 beds, 3 rows to each bed. At the time of this photo, this bed had already been weeded twice. And the carrots still have weeks to go! After the weeding, additional labor is required to harvest, wash, bunch, and pack the carrots for sale. There’s a lot that goes into a $3 bunch of carrots!
When a crop fails in the field, there are hours of labor invested in a product that won’t generate any income.
At this point in the season, there are already multiple hours of labor invested in each row on the farm.
From planting seedlings in the greenhouse through preparing and transplanting into the fields, weeding, and, if we get it all right, harvesting. Then there is washing, sorting, and packing to do before a crop reaches our customers.
Most of our brassicas (brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages) were afflicted with the same awful disease this summer. We lost a few dozen rows of summer crops, and also lost the fall-planting seedlings to pests. Any brussels sprouts or broccoli we manage to squeak out will be truly miraculous.
We could have “saved” the crops by spraying them with harsh chemical products to deter pests and microorganisms—but we are committed to growing organically and so we did not do that.
Selling our produce in multiple virtual storefronts comes at a cost.
Our website is a significant monthly expense, and the delivery services we sell through also charge us a significant percentage on each item. These expenses were not really a factor in the pre-COVID economy, when we could sell all of our product at two farmers markets each week.
2020 has been the year of excessive packaging.
Historically, we sold most of our produce at the farmers markets, where customers placed items directly into their own reusable bags — not this year! Selling online through our website and on other local distribution hubs such as WhatsGood, Farm Fresh RI and Pats Pastured has required us to invest in more packaging and labeling solutions. Packaging and labeling also requires additional labor and new workflow systems.