He taps his credit card on the counter as he scans over the charges on the screen I’ve presented him.  He gives a little nod at each price.  Then I see him look down at the pint of split pea soup in his hand and furrow his brow before looking back at the screen.  The split pea soup is 13.95.  The price was posted on the freezer in giant font.  We don’t want our prices to catch people off guard.  But I can tell he didn’t see it, and he’s taken aback by it.

Farmers’ Market sales nation-wide are in decline.  So are farm-direct sales.  Ten years ago, I’d say, was the spike of the local food renaissance:  A brief period where the small farmer achieved hero status.  We were objects of public fascination, darlings of the media.  Our calloused hands and dirty fingernails, once viewed as afflictions, held brief sex appeal.  

Ten years ago I’d never have gone to the trouble to pack up split pea soup to sell.  Ten years ago I’d have printed a recipe for split pea soup.  Heck.  I’d have written a several hundred page cookbook.  I did.  I wrote four of them, in fact.  That’s because ten years ago, the local food renaissance was drawing people back into their kitchens, connecting them with family, community and the soil all in the course of a simple meal. 

But something has changed.  One generation of home cooks is empty-nesting, and the millennial generation is right back to where we were at the start of the local food movement:  stressed, harried, and interested in buying solutions as conveniently possible, with as few face-to-face human interactions as possible.  

But, we farmers see in our trade magazines, millennials have added some caveats.  They want superior nutrition.  They want organic.  Save the world, save the soil, save our bodies.  But do so conveniently and without the burden of human interaction.  

It takes two months to raise a chicken to processing stage out on pasture.  It takes 72 hours to simmer the chicken bones to make a fully nutritious broth rich in collagen, vitamins and  electrolytes.  It takes 114 days’ gestation to bring a piglet into the world,  and six months to raise it out on pasture without confinement feeding, antibiotics or artificial hormones.  It takes one week to brine pork hocks in the maple syrup that took Dad, Bob and our neighbor Tom four weeks to produce by tapping trees and boiling sap.  Then it takes Dad one full day to properly smoke those hocks.  After all this,  I have some ingredients to make a proper soup, which, start to finish, will require another 6 hours.  

“They’ll never sell at that price!”  Mom tells me on the phone after I finish adding up the ingredients and labor involved in offering this new product line.  If we’re to sell frozen soups and stews, they need to go for 26.95 for a quart, 13.95 for a pint.  I’m not interested in under-valuing my family’s labor.  If our split pea soup were sold at a price to compete with conventional split pea soup – made with water or watery broth and factory-farmed ham bits, we’d work ourselves to the bone trying to meet demand while at the same time draining the farm bank accounts.  Or we’d compromise our values.  I’m reminded of the age-old saying:  Cheap, Fast and Good:  Pick two.   

I think of all this as I watch my customer and neighbor deliberate over the price of his next meal.  And I think about how easy it is to tout the nutritional benefits of the soup as a selling point.  They’re obvious.  And I know he’s aware of the ecological benefits.  He’s taken the time to walk our pastures, watched attentively as the chickens ran after bugs, marveled at how the health of our grasses pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and fixes it into the soil.  But as I watch him debate whether to complete this transaction, I want to point out how the vibrance of our soil, and his choice to support our work, is reaching out to our community.   The soil has grown the food that flows through this cafe and down to our farmers’ market.  These are the places where neighbors come to buy, as well as to find out where to get a tire repaired, ask questions about their dog’s health, deliberate whether to fix or replace a stove, explain to a teenager the nuances of parallel parking, find someone who can help fix a porch railing, or have a heated discussion about the best way to get a flying squirrel out of a bathroom.  

These are not places of convenience.  These are places of community.  And while the mainstream culture tells us that speed and efficiency are the drivers of economic success, this way of doing business reaches farther.  A 2016 study in the Sacramento region found that for every dollar of sales on a direct-marketing farm, direct marketers generated twice as much economic activity in the region as a commodity farm.  That same study found that local-scale farmers are creating 13 full time jobs per one million dollars in sales (compared to 3 jobs per one million in sales for industrial farming)*.  

Can we small-scale farmers produce more convenient foods?  Sure.  But we have to achieve more than convenience.  We have to be effective.  Livelihoods such as ours can’t be fulfilled by simply meeting the changing forces of the marketplace.  Frozen soup is merely a product that we sell.  The health of the soil, the purity of the air and the well-being of our community is the actual work of a farmer, and it cannot be done without the support of our customers.  

These are the things I think as I see this man tap his credit card on the counter.  I don’t dare say them out loud.  He’s been my customer for over twenty years.  He doesn’t need my brow-beating.  But does he remember all this as he evaluates the price of his food?

He does.  He smiles and hands me his credit card.  Then he waves the soup at me and tells me how he’s eating alone tomorrow night, and he’s looking forward to sitting out on his porch to enjoy it.  

Then he leans over and, in a soft voice, tells me thank you.  “Thank you, for all you’re doing.  For all of us.”  

And I realize then that I’d been holding my breath the entire time.  But I didn’t need to.  He knew.  He understood. 

Will the next generation?  

*Economic Impact of Local Food Producers in the Sacramento Region, 2016