Vegetable farms that sell their produce through farmers markets, CSA programs, on-farm stores, and other direct-market channels are the foundation of local food movements everywhere. Yet there is surprisingly little information available to help answer a basic question: Can farmers make a middle-class income selling vegetables through direct-market outlets?
PASA farming launched an ongoing study in 2017 to help fill this critical gap in information and provide insights that could help vegetable farmers start and grow their businesses. Their new report offers the most comprehensive review of direct-market vegetable farm businesses to date, sharing detailed financial benchmarks from 39 farms collected over three years.
Participating farms were located in four Mid-Atlantic states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Most had less than 15 acres in vegetables production; the largest had approximately 100. Farms studied had been in business for anywhere between one and 50 years.
The findings were consistent with structural challenges that negatively impact small- and medium-scale farms in a highly consolidated agriculture industry. In other words: They were sobering.
They found that the majority of direct-market vegetable farms were not earning a middle-class income. Participating farms had a median net income of $18,500, which approximates the 2020 poverty rate in Pennsylvania for a two-person household. Further, the net incomes of more than 70% of the farms in the study were less than half the median net income for all Pennsylvania farms, which include among others dairy, row crop, and wholesale vegetable operations.
There were some farms bucking the trend. A quarter of study participants had earned net incomes greater than the Pennsylvania median household annual income of $57,000. These farms tended to be larger in scale than many market-garden-style farms—typically, ten acres or more in vegetable production—and often capitalized on diversifying their revenue streams, with reselling products produced by other local farms proving to be one of the more profitable added enterprises.
Notably, however, many of the owners of these high-performing farms partially attributed their success to good fortune, such as access to especially lucrative markets or reliable farmland arrangements.
Read the complete research at www.pasafarming.org.
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August 23, 2021 at 07:16PM
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Can direct-market vegetable farmers make a middle-class income? - hortidaily.com
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