Buy Local Food In Kitsap

This is the second brochure in a series explaining why and how you can support local farmers, farms and locally produced food. Let’s review a couple of key points from the first brochure:

1. Preservation of farm land, farms and farmers depends on developing healthy farm businesses.
2. The constraint on the development of healthy farm businesses is capital.
3. What is needed is a new alliance of farmer as entrepreneur and manager and the consumer as angel investor, consumer and supporter.

The first step most people take to support local farmers is to buy their produce. Here is a list of the ways that you can do this:

1. Shop at farmers’ markets.
2. Join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to buy “farm shares”.
3. Purchase food from co-ops and retailers that source their farm produce locally
4. Visit a local farm to buy during the season for specialty crops like berries, fruit, greens, plants or even eggs, dairy and poultry.

CAPITAL: THE MOTHER’S MILK OF FARM BUSINESSES
The truth is that there are still many local farmers committed to bring you healthy, nutritional, locally produced foods. These thoughtful, hard working, entrepreneurial folks are just strapped to the yolk, struggling every day to understand the economic tide flowing against them and crafting plans to produce and deliver what you really want for your food. This is hard to understand sometimes because of the oftentimes brutal labor, risks, indifference and hardships that the typical farmer must endure. Farming is about the only business I know that counts profit before deducting for the farmer’s labor. For most local farmers their “profit” is less than the wage that we would need to pay to hire people willing to do the work.

According to government statistics less than 3% of the workforce produces the food for the rest of us. What should concern you about the future is how to incent younger farmers to take up the work in the face of impossible land costs, capital equipment needs, increasingly burdensome regulation and all of the other obstacles to success in local farming.

The good news is that there are good young people willing to do just that and they need your help.

We all need to consider what our lives would be like if all of us as consumers were to stand by and watch our local farmers disappear.

Here is a list of ways in which you can supply capital to a local farmer:

1. Loan them money directly.
2. Loan them money through your self-directed IRA or 401K
3. Loan money through third parties (e.g. www.Prosper.com).
4. Loan them equipment.
5. Pre-pay for a season’s produce.
6. Purchase, animals and seed that they manage on your behalf.
7. Pay yourself for capital improvements and inputs for the farm that the farmer then repays out of profits sharing (e.g. fencing, irrigation).
8. Ask that the retailers that you support by purchasing locally produced food from their outlets provide capital for local farmers.
9. Become a guarantor for loans from other lenders and suppliers.
10. Trade equipment for produce.
11. If you are in a business that purchases food as an input (e.g. catering, restaurant, care facility) pre-pay for contracts to supply seasonal produce.
12. Join entities, existing or created, to fill the capital gap for local farm enterprises.
13. Encourage others to join you. Pass out brochures, hold coffees in your home to discuss this with your neighbors, call your retailers and co-ops that support local farms and ask them to help provide capital for your local farmers.
14. Become a “sourcer” to find equipment and supplies that become available that might be useful to your local farmers.
15. Organize a farm tour for your local farmer or open house and engage those visitors that come to spend a part of the day listening to what the farmer needs to continue their farm operation and improve.

Obviously there are different risks and administrative burdens involved and you need to do what you are personally comfortable doing. You also do not want to violate any laws including those regulating securities, but there are administratively efficient ways to become a farm angel with as little as $50.00 and all you need is access to the internet and a debit or credit card.

Having said that, you might also wish to consider the benefits to you of stretching your comfort zone and learning something new about entrepreneurship and farming in your local community.

To Download a copy of this article in 3 column brochure format click How To Support Farmers.