One of the reasons why I look forward to going to farmer’s market six months out of the year is that I get to interact with an interesting and diverse group of people, many of whom make their living in agriculture.
This week at market, we had a last minute visitor while breaking down the stand – precisely, a last-fifteen-minute visitor, who kept me from packing up to go home.
He was seventy-two, and I respect that. Said he was a farmer – although, as it turned out - not by any standard that would fly in Franklin County. It’s a safe bet that’s not the occupation listed on his tax return, either.
He claimed to be some sort of famous former investment banker/consultant/CEO - however, unless he was Steve Jobs, the only corporate muckety-muck I can name, I wasn’t going to be impressed.
Nevertheless, he successfully landed his Golden Parachute across the lake in New York State, and considered himself a singular success because he can wholesale all the beef he produces from 40 livestock.
During the conversation, he hit all the trendy marketing words: certified organic, grass fed, never frozen, and threw in “pedigree, closed herd,” as well.
I thought for a moment that he would also tell me he had a “humane back-forty” where all the retired old bulls and cows live out their post-productive years, but his marketing scheme wasn’t quite that impractical.
The crux of his annual sales involved moving fresh carcasses through a high-end purveyor direct to restaurants in NYC.
This was fine until recently; he discovered that when a consumer ate his beef, it averaged six dollars more a pound then when it left the farm. He wants to recapture that money by selling direct.
His point in speaking to me?
He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to sell his beef at the Burlington Farmer’s Market. ‘It wasn’t fair’, he said, he ‘lives close by – so it’s LOCAL’, and he ‘sells a SUPERIOR product.’
Harrumph!
He questioned the quality of our beef and the market’s organic purveyors’ in as much as we hadn’t sold everything we brought. (There are five meat sellers in the park; if anyone sells out, they didn’t bring enough.)
I left this encounter with ruminations as to why I don’t think he’ll do well in a value-added endeavor:
EASY: a professional kitchen can deal with all the parts on a carcass.
HARD: consumers want what they want, and less-popular pieces need more effort to move them than trying to impress potential customers with your celebrity, and how very lovely your cows are.
NICE: Vermonters are making real efforts to support local agriculture.
NAUGHTY: He looks to take income away from local farmers, and can fold his business without financial consequence whenever he gets bored.
REALITY CHECK: I suppose that his biggest stumbling block will be the realization that the privilege he previously enjoyed doesn’t extend to the chosen field of his retirement hobby.
