Amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, some local farms have doubled or tripled direct sales to Vermonters, with business at farm stands and community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, soaring in the state.
Although state data from March through July show Vermont farms losing money on average, farms that have been pivoted to direct sales are reporting major growth.
But scaling up a business often involves expensive investments, and farmers hope that new customers will remain, even after the pandemic winds down.
For people who are nervous about crowded grocery aisles or bare shelves, buying directly from a local farmer is one way that Vermonters have been adapting to the pandemic. And farmers have adapted to meet the increased demand for local food, especially as their wholesale business with restaurants has dwindled.
And the impact on farm businesses has been remarkable. According to Abbey Willard, director of the stateโs agricultural development division, it wasnโt unusual for farms doing direct sales to report their volume grew by 200% this year. Willard credited it to both โan outpouring of support for local agriculture but also the consumer preference that wanted a safe, reliable, guaranteed, close-to-home food source.โ
While state officials say there are between 700 and 800 produce farms in Vermont, statistics are hard to come by on how many of those farms are offering CSAs. With many restaurants closed and people home from work and school, grocery stores also report a 50% increase in demand.
Plus, some grocery stores imposed limits on how many items a consumer could buy, such as setting a cap of one dairy product per person. โMeat was tricky because (meat-packing) plants were closing due to COVID,โ Willard said. Vermont, in contrast, was safe because of the low numbers of cases.
โWe heard from CSA farms that they were quickly able to increase production and accommodate some growth in demand,โ said Willard. โThen we heard from farm stands that it was like Thanksgiving every day for months.โ
At some farms around the state, sales more than doubled. Chuck Wooster, who owns Sunrise Farms in Hartland, is one of those farmers. Wooster has been farming for 21 years, but this was an unusual year by any metric. After the pandemic hit, Wooster saw a huge increase in people interested in his CSA program.
In a typical year, Sunrise Farm sells shares to 150 customers. This year, that number jumped to 350. To adjust, Wooster turned one of the large barns at his farm into an area where customers can pick up their crops โ and respect social distancing norms.
Wooster converted a storage area into public-facing space. At the entrance to the barn, he installed a hand-washing station to make pickups safe at the farm.
โItโs been great,โ Wooster said. โThis has been our best year ever.โ
And Wooster says he knows thatโs true for other small farms doing direct sales, too. Wooster has nine employees and has always run the farm exclusively using the CSA model. Customers pay for their share at the beginning of the growing season, as early as March or April, and then typically receive a box with produce and sometimes dairy or meat every week. The programs usually wrap up in the fall, although some go as late as December.
Itโs called โcommunity supportedโ because customers pay for the program in full upfront, putting seed money into farmersโ hands when they need to make investments for the season to come.
While Wooster was enthusiastic about this yearโs sales growth, he said that owning a farm is really hard. Now, he is wary as he describes his small farm on the brink of becoming a midsized operation. That can be a financially difficult place to be, he said because it often means competing on an industrial scale. Plus, the costs of running a bigger farm are greater. Before the pandemic, Wooster expanded his farm into a second location, down the road from where he lives and farms. Before he moved, it didnโt seem so bad to share the cost of plowing and internet between where he was living and farming, but now those expenses have doubled. He described it as being โan expensive size.โ
This year, he said, โThe supply chain shifted,โ as people stopped eating out. But he speculates the market will probably go back to normal when people start eating in restaurants again.
โThen we wonโt sell as much,โ Wooster said.
Danielle Allen of Root 5 Farm in Fairlee reports similar growth in the CSA program, which has doubled from 180 shares last year to 360 shares this year.
โIt was kind of a gift,โ Allen said. She said the conditions of the pandemic were the โconfluence of eventsโ that helped first-time customers be successful in using the CSA well. Anyone who had a busy travel schedule before Covid was freed up, and opportunities to eat out were seriously limited.
For a CSA to work well, โyou have to be committed to your kitchen,โ Allen explained. During the pandemic, people havenโt had the option of going out as they would in a normal year. Sometimes people feel bad about CSAs because they end up wasting food, but Allen said sheโs heard that people were doing well this year.
Allen farms with her husband, Ben Dana, and they got their start at the Intervale in Burlington, where they leased 14 acres for 10 years before buying the 36 acres they now farm in Fairlee.
Turmeric and ginger are two of items that have been popular with customers. Because of the short Vermont growing season, the turmeric roots donโt grow to their full maturity. Theyโre perishable and couldnโt last very long on a grocery shelf, but Allen harvests them right before setting out CSA boxes for pickup so people can use them while theyโre fresh.
Allen said they didnโt have to invest in infrastructure to accommodate the growth, a common barrier for many farmers looking to expand. โWe were set up well for it,โ she added. But thereโs a limit to how many people they will take on in a year, and they have a long waiting list of as many as 180 people who want to buy their boxes, but canโt right now.
Allen and Dana donโt want to sacrifice quality for quantity, so โwe turn people away.โ
But they also feel a responsibility to provide food for the community, and Allen acknowledged that growing food is โimportant work during this time.โ As food insecurity has grown to alarmingly high rates, Allen said farmers are working on solutions such as Fairleeโs local Free Food Tuesday events on the town green.
Allen said food insecurity has intensified for people already struggling to get enough to eat before the pandemic.
Willing Hands, an organization that works on food insecurity, also comes to glean crops from Root 5 Farm. The Allens have six employees; two stay on year-round and four come for seasonal work. The farm grows produce and partners with two other local farmers to provide a meat-share as an add-on and a fruit-share with peaches and plums.
Root 5 Farm also sells produce wholesale to local grocery stores, including the Hanover Co-op, and while it also sells to restaurants in normal years, Allen said those sales were โway downโ this year. They also decided not to sell at the Norwich farmers market this year, and instead focused their energy on the expanded CSA program.
Even before the pandemic, the CSA boxes were prepacked and there is no contact at the time of pickup, another Covid-friendly feature. Allen said it was โkind of luckโ that they were already doing things that way, and it helped everything to go smoothly this season, too.
They already had a website up and running, which gave them a market advantage. Many small farms have had to rush to create so they could start an e-commerce business.
Allen is optimistic about seasons to come. โI do see this sustaining us through the next years,โ she said. In spite of the โbig hurdleโ of building relationships with new customers, โthereโs this magical thing. If we can hold people for two years, we can retain them.โ
โWe feel like weโve found a very happy scale,โ Allen said. She said they are not looking to expand any further โ although she did say that sometimes, late at night, she found herself looking at large machinery for harvesting carrots on YouTube.
Scaling up means competing with large, industrial companies across the country and the world. Allen described going into the Hanover Co-op and looking at her carrots next to carrots grown in California and Guatemala. โThese are not the same,โ she said, but โthe consumer doesnโt know all the economic implications of one carrot.โ
Currently Allenโs carrots are harvested and weeded by hand.
In spite of the manual labor, Allen described the way theyโre farming as highly efficient. โSix people feed 360 families,โ she said. โWe feed them a diverse diet.โ And, for now, pandemic or not, they have no plans to stop feeding them anytime soon.