Five growers who rent land from the New England Small Farm Institute in Belchertown, Massachusetts, are winding up their third season of marketing together. After several efforts at cooperative marketing that weren’t satisfactory, they think they have found a winning strategy. The five are selling their produce cooperatively at farmers’ markets, after giving up on a cooperative CSA and farm stand. It’s working out great,” said Jeremy Barker-Plotkin, one of the vegetable growers in the coop, which is called Lampson Brook Farms. As we learn to work with each other better, each of us is able to produce the crops we like best.” The arrangement also allows the farmers to attend only one farmers’ market a week, while selling at three. Plus, the farmers believe that having a market stand stocked abundantly with the produce from five farms attracts more customers and increases sales over what each farmer would make if they were selling individually. On weeks we haven’t had our full display, we don’t get as many people over to the stand,” Jeremy said.

The coop has two vegetable growers, a cut flower grower, an egg producer and a greenhouse grower who specializes in red bell peppers and passionflower plants. They attend the markets in Cambridge, Amherst and Sturbridge. Two big issues face growers who are marketing together: allocating production, and dividing work. As far as production goes, the two vegetable growers stay away from the red bell peppers and cut flowers, because others in the group are already producing them. But those two vegetable growers have had to negotiate which crops each of them will grow. The first season, one did early crops and the other did later crops, which worked because the early-crop farmer was busy with a wedding and honeymoon in late summer and the late-crop grower was out of the country in spring. Once they were both available to work all season, they had to fine-tune the division. They tried alternating succession plantings, but that didn’t work because many crops came on at the same time anyway and then they would have to negotiate who got to sell what. Finally they decided to specialize in the crops they like to grow. One grower likes to grow with a two-row planter and cultivator, whereas the other likes to grow intensively with hand tools, so that has pointed them to different crops. This year, they overlapped only on potatoes, garlic and winter squash. Dividing the marketing work load has also been a challenge. Two of the members don’t work at all in marketing and the others put in varying work hours.

So how to compensate each member fairly? Jeremy thinks they have come up with a good system, after several false starts. Now they take 15% of each grower’s sales and save it in the coop’s account. They reserve a small amount for start-up expenses the following year, and then distribute the rest to the worker members in proportion to the number of hours they worked. So each member gets paid for the produce he or she contributed, and receives a bonus based on how many hours of work they gave to the coop. The five members arrived on the land rented by the Small Farm Institute around the same time. A CSA that has previously operated from the farm had some better years and some not-so-great years,” Jeremy said. The problem was not being able to attract a solid group of members. We’re a town over from Amherst (home to the University of Massachusetts), in a more conservative town, and we hadn’t had the easy sell a lot of the CSAs in Amherst had.” The five growers abandoned the pure CSA model and instead set up a farm market at the farm.

They sold Farm Dollars to people to use at the farm stand, but also welcomed cash sales from neighbors. In addition to their own products, they also sold meat, honey and other items from growers not in their marketing coop. But the farm stand was not a success, primarily because it was not in a well-traveled location. Once the coop had sold the Farm Dollars, the growers felt obligated to keep it open even though they weren’t making any money. When they switched to the farmers’ markets this year, they didn’t sell Farm Dollars for fear they would again be obligated if the arrangement didn’t work out. Now that they have met with success, they may resume sales of Farm Dollars that can be redeemed at the farmers’ markets.