Winter 'Farmers Market' With Trucked in Produce Explained

I took a potshot the other day at plans for a winter farmers market in Somerville, Mass., zeroing in on the fact that some of the produce will be trucked in from as far south as Florida. I noted that organizers of the market were promising that the out-of-state stuff will be clearly labeled as such. So at least gullible shoppers won’t be scammed by vendors posing as employees of the farm where the produce was grown and presumably harvested a short while earlier. But still, should a market that sells produce grown by a third party a thousand miles away be allowed to hitch a ride on the farmers market fad by calling itself such a thing?

I called Dave Jackson (pictured with his family), of Enterprise Farm, which will be supplying the Somerville winter market with produce from the southern states, to seek an explanation. Jackson offered an illuminating response, explaining how he got into the business of shipping produce from a thousand miles away, how that makes economic and environmental sense, and why it is ultimately a good thing for customers and for the viability of small farms like his in New England. The conversation also touched on other topics, including what it all means for the future of the locavore phenomenon. To read my interview with Jackson, click over to the jump page.

Enterprise Farm is an 80-acre, certified organic operation, in Whatley, Mass., 100 miles west of Boston, with impeccable integrity and pedigree, that has been supplying produce to farmers markets, restaurants, food co-ops and other retailers in New England for 27 years. Jackson said he began procuring produce from a network of organic farms and cooperatives in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas several years ago, at the behest of a coalition of food co-ops in the Connecticut Valley. The co-ops had recently begun using his services to make a consolidated purchase of produce from some of Jackson's organic farming friends in western Massachusetts.

 

“They realized that rather than making six phone calls and getting six trucks from six farms, they could reduce the carbon footprint and the amount of time that produce would spend on the truck by having us deliver it direct. We did that for two seasons,” Jackson explained. “Then, one of the produce managers at one of the co-ops who had lived and worked in the Southeast told us about the growers co-ops down there. So we contacted them and sourced produce off the East Coast for an entire winter for 16 food co-ops, and to a Whole Foods in the area.”

 

After a couple of winters of dealing with the headache of getting trucks through snowstorms, Jackson said he had gotten his fill of being a produce distributor. Besides, larger distributors had gotten wind of what he was doing and swiped the business by offering the co-ops a better deal, which they could afford given their much higher volume. “We realized we weren't going to be able to compete in that business in the long run,” Jackson said. “But it was very good for the farm. We learned a lot. We learned how to source, how to work with farms, all that kind of stuff,” all of which soon paid off in other ways.

 

By the time Jackson’s stint as a shipper of produce to retailers ended, Enterprise Farms had started a CSA, serving customers in western Massachusetts and the Boston area. It quickly grew from 100 to 700 members, some of whom wanted some of the organic produce that he was bringing up from the south. So, the Enterprise Farm CSA now offers customers the option of signing up for a “local share,” which runs from June 1 through Nov. 20, and/or an “East Coast share,” which runs from Dec. 1 through May 20.

 

The fruits and vegetables in the local boxes are mostly from Enterprise Farm itself, supplemented with a few specialty items from a handful of other partner farms in the vicinity. The winter boxes include local root vegetables, storage crops and salad mixes grown in greenhouses, and, “to keep things interesting,” a wide array of other fruits and vegetables from “partner farms” in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. That is good for the CSA members who want that choice and also good for the long-term viability of Enterprise Farm, as Jackson explained.

 

“We have this 80-acre farm that has to generate its income for seven months to pay for 12 months of sitting here. And as organics got bigger and bigger and more global, obviously the prices we were used to getting in the early days started going down. We would make all this money and spend it sitting idle for the winter. So this opportunity was one where we could keep the farm running 12 months out of the year, and keep our veteran employees employed. And we could serve our customer base throughout the year. So we are using our farm infrastructure more efficiently.”

 

I wondered whether shipping produce up to New England from the South would deter innovation by local farmers that otherwise might occur to meet rising demand for truly local food. Jackson said that hasn’t been the case. To the contrary.

 

“This past year, 35 percent of what we sell through our winter program was grown in New England, believe it or not. I just ran the numbers in June. In the first year, it was like 2 percent. In the second year, it was 9 percent. We project over time that the winter shares will be about 50 percent root crops and apples and salad greens [from greenhouses] and stored cabbages and leeks and all that kind of stuff that we can get locally. For now, growers in New England do not really have the infrastructure to store a crop very well, except for the guys up in Vermont who have been doing it for a long time. But the root crop and storage crop industry up here is booming.”

 

Still, many of his customers, as supportive of local farms as they are, wouldn’t want to get through an entire New England winter on a diet of root and storage crops alone, Jackson added.

 

“They are more accepting of a regional food procurement model. A big part of it is families with little kids -- and I have three kids. They like fruit. That's a big part of what sells our shares. We get citrus, we get berries and we get strawberries from down south all year. And the fruit, especially the vine-ripened, organic citrus, is so good.”

 

Jackson went on to say that those who have a knee-jerk reaction against trucked in produce should take a more regional view of the issue of food security. They should “get around the idea of Florida being so far away and look on the upside” of having a viable East Coast foodshed. From Homestead, Fla., to Prince Edward Island in Canada, there are more potential acres that could be put into and kept in agricultural production than on the West Coast, Jackson explained, if only East Coast consumers could end their dependence on production from the West Coast, which has been forced on them by big agribusiness. That’s a trend that Enterprise Farm is promoting with his alliances with organic farmers in the southern states. “North and South are banding together to fight the West,” Jackson said.

 

But is produce trucked in from Florida as fresh as local-food advocates insist produce should be? And what about the carbon footprint issue?

 

Jackson explains that none of the farms he works with in the South is more than 1,000 miles away from Massachusetts, which is 2,000 miles closer than the West Coast, where most supermarket produce comes from in the winter. And since the produce is trucked more or less directly from southern farms to Enterprise Farm, where it is boxed up and quickly passed on to customers, quite a bit of the conventional food distribution system, and resulting time lags, gets bypassed.

 

“We can get a truck out of Florida loaded with lettuce that is picked on Friday to our farm on Monday and deliver the product, which oftentimes is better than what we can do in New England with our own fresh lettuce. If we send it through a distribution system, it might not get to the customer for seven or 10 days, believe it or not.”

 

And, unlike produce distributed through packing houses, where crops from everywhere are merged and repackaged several times en route from farm to store, Enterprise Farm CSA customers can get a very good idea where their fruits and vegetables were grown. “You see from our website that we try to be as transparent as we can,” said Jackson.  The site names the farms and cooperatives with which Enterprise Farms has formed partnerships, including Eastern Carolina Organics and Homestead Organics in Florida. And if his customers have further questions, they can get, and indeed often demand, answers.“The premise of the CSA model is that people invest in your farm, and they have part ownership. And trust me, if people aren't happy they let us know. We have a lot of constructive criticism and feedback. We also have a weekly newsletter. We will put out to the customer base, for example, that these dudes in Florida have this weird fruit and we got the guy to send us 30 boxes. We sent it out, and nobody liked it. It was black sapote. It’s a delicacy down there. People make a pudding out of it. It looked like paving tar to me. As much as people didn't like it, they were really jazzed on the idea of trying it.”

 

Though many of his customers might appreciate what he is doing, I wondered, has Jackson caught any flack from hardline locavores?

 

“I am not a locavore,” Jackson replied. “Being a farmer, I believe in the farm community. I want to support a farm in Florida as much as I do my neighbor. That's what keeps farmland open and that's what benefits the environment. I'm more of a regionalist. But I think the locavore thing is great. I think the locavore movement should be congratulated for helping get the local food movement up and running. So I don't want to denigrate it. I think it has really been kind of like the way organics first came on the scene. It brought an awareness. It challenged people. A lot of people thought organic was stupid at first, but it created the awareness that opened the door for what we now do in reaching a more mom-and-pop crowd with organic produce.”

 

All of which brought me to my question about how the plan for a winter farmers market in Somerville, featuring organic produce from small farms in the southern states, came about, and what he thinks of the idea.

 

“They tried to get a winter farmers market off the ground with just local production, but they couldn't find any farmers who would come,” Jackson said. “And they canvassed their customers and most of them said they didn't want to come if it was just celeriac and turnips. We have two winter markets out here, and by mid-March, you are looking at some shrively, tired beets. In my mind, Yuk! But if you could have local winter storage crops with a complement of vegetables and fruit from down south, customers would come. We do the summer farmers market in Somerville, and they knew we had a winter CSA, so that is why they approached us.”

 

So is the future bright for farms like his, I asked.

 

“Customers are hard to predict and I can’t tell you where it is going to go from here,” Jackson said. “But I very much appreciate the fact that people are coming to the farm now and are really trying to support the farm directly and want to get around the middleman. You don't want to know what happens to the produce between point A and point B. It’s strange. I’ve been in distribution. I don't think people really realize what is happening to their food. And when you are supporting your local grower, you are getting the best and the most transparent word about your product.”