NEW WEST FEATURE

Small Farms Turn to Direct Sales to Stay Afloat

By David Frey, 12-13-10

	A sign at Orchard Valley Farms welcomes visitors to pick their own vegetables. David Frey photo.

Turn off the highway, wind past the old trestle bridge, and it’s easy to believe you’ve entered another world when you pull up to Orchard Valley Farms & Market. Acres of cherry trees and peach trees seem to stretch to the foot of Mount Lamborn in the distance. Grapes plump in the rows of vineyards. At the end of the fall season, a few vegetable crops remained, and Jennifer Dunn was on a quest to pick what remained.

“We love coming down here and getting a little country life back,” said Jennifer Dunn, a Phoenix, Ariz. city girl, towing her children Lucas, 5, and Reagan, 2, in a wagon to the U-pick garden at the Paonia, Colo. Farm.

They’re the kind of customers Orchard Valley, like other surrounding farms, have come to rely on. With massive farms dominating more and more of the share of agribusiness, smaller farmers are turning to on-site sales as a way to boost their revenues. They’re catering to a growing interest in local produce and do-it-yourself farming, while cutting out distributors.

It’s become a booming business for Paonia. Once a major producer of apples and cherries, the town has found new popularity among people coming to buy their food straight from the source, and maybe, like Dunn, pick it themselves.

“It just started happening,” said Lee Bradley, who with his wife Kathy owns Orchard Valley Farms. They also own Black Bridge Winery, a vineyard that shares the same 100-acre farm, and the on-site market where they sell their produce and wine, as well as other local products, including those from their competitors.

“We started encouraging other people (to farm),” Bradley said. “Our philosophy is, we’re not giving away business when we are doing that. We’re just making a bigger pie and it becomes a destination.”

Farms like these don’t fit in the mold of what has become the dominant force of American agriculture – the giant operations that are producing more and more of the nation’s food. But they are a growing facet of agriculture across the country and the West. According to the latest figures from the 2007 agricultural census, small farms account for only a sliver of the produce grown in the country, but they comprise most American farms, and their numbers are growing. While large farms, with sales of more than $500,000 in annual sales, grew by 46,000 between 2003 and 2007, very small farms, with sales of less than $2,500 grew by 74,000.

Many small farms are turning to other models and income streams to stay afloat. Farms, like the Bradleys’, which sell directly to consumers, represent less than half a percent of the nation’s agriculture, but their numbers are on the rise. They grew 17 percent between 2002 and 2007, and sales rose 29 percent, adjusted for inflation.

Almost all of these farms were small family farms, some of which relied on community-supported agriculture models or on selling value-added products like fruit jams and flower arrangements. Farms turning to sidelines like agri-tourism and providing recreational services actually dropped 17 percent, but the income they brought in soared 236 percent over 2002.

“Producers are finding that diversification can make their operations more profitable by providing additional income,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded.

Organic sales are on the rise, too. Average organic sales jumped 61 percent between 2002 and 2007, with $3.16 billion in total sales in 2008. About 7 percent of those sales were direct to consumers, either from the farm, at farmer’s markets or through CSAs.

Like many small farmers, the Bradleys never received organic certification, although they say they don’t use chemicals. “We like the phrase ‘gently grown,’” Kathy Bradley said. But trends toward buying organic and buying local have given new life to small towns like Paonia where their agricultural heritage could have been threatened with extinction.

The Bradleys say their model, a combination of U-pick produce, market sales and wine production, has worked for them.

“Nineteen years we’ve been down here,” Kathy said. “It’d say it’s pretty sustainable. Definitely the market allows us to farm. Selling retail and local products helps us and helps our community.”

David Frey writes in Glenwood Springs, Colo. Follow him at www.davidmfrey.com or on Twitter.

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