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August 24, 2021 09:22 pm

The Farmers Market is Moving Online

The pandemic has brought rampant growth for local food distribution platforms. From a report: For the past two decades at Crystal Organic Farm in Newborn, Georgia, a typical Saturday morning involved Nicolas Donck and, later, his partner in farming and in life, Jeni Jarrard, getting up at 4AM, loading up the truck with tables and tent and coolers and bins of eggs, peppers, okra, melons, herbs, flowers, or whatever was good that week, driving the hour to Atlanta, and spending a day in whatever weather -- including sweltering heat, pouring rain, or bitter cold -- before hauling the hour back, happy from feeding their community the food they spent all week growing, but also exhausted, and just a few hundred bucks richer for it. Then the pandemic came, and it hit farms hard. Supply chains, customer bases, and in some cases labor were upended. Small and medium-sized independent farms that relied on restaurant wholesale lost huge percentages of their business overnight. Some local CSAs folded. Some farming operations went belly up. Others, however, found a new path online. Farmer-specific e-commerce apps and services -- among them, GrazeCart, Farmdrop, Farmigo, and GrownBy -- have cropped up in recent years, offering the direct-to-consumer sales, customizable CSAs, preorders and delivery that farmers markets haven't. When the pandemic began, this tech offered a new world of possibility. Donck and Jarrard were among the farmers who took the leap. When food distribution chains collapsed and people turned to local food, the pair made the snap decision to eliminate their old-school CSA program, lean into their relationships with two tech-based distribution platforms with which they'd already worked, and transition the rest of their business to sales and distribution platform Barn2Door. Now, late-pandemic farming looks like skipping the market, staying in bed for hours longer on Saturday, and enjoying a cup of coffee together -- all while quadrupling business by selling online. Does this ever-expanding landscape of food distribution tech make the job easy? Not in all ways, says Donck. "There's always room for improvement. For example, everybody wants cucumbers, but we don't have any right now," he says, lamenting the loss of a week's crop to a swarm of squash bugs. "[Our customers] will have to go somewhere else for those." But he and Jarrard agree, they don't intend to go back to the way things were before.

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