What the Farm Gives: A Morning at the Wholesale Farmers’ Market

By 6:30 yesterday morning, I was chatting with Jack Hoeffner, one of the farmers who sells at the Wholesale Farmers’ Market at Hunt’s Point in the Bronx. New York City’s Greenmarket had organized a two-hour buyers’ tour to introduce farmers and customers, and to attract attention to the market, which came under Greenmarket’s purview just last year. The drive up from Brooklyn, a mecca of sorts for good foodies in this city, was seamless at that hour, but my first smile of the day was when one of the entrance guards explained that, you know, he didn’t see too many ladies up here. When you’re about to spend a few hours with some old school vegetable growers, you may as well start off old school.

This market is a place where farmers can sell directly to wholesale buyers like restaurants, corner grocery stores, and small-scale food processors. Today there were nine sellers, their white trucks scattered across the parking lot, with bags of corn and onions, and boxes of potatoes, peppers, and cucumbers stacked on the concrete. The farmers are here because selling at this market allows them to sell in bulk but at an agreeable price and without much distribution responsibility.

Hoeffner, who farms in Montgomery, New York, and whose family has been in the business for five generations, attributes the challenges of the small farmer to reckless markets. In a traditional wholesale market, he might make an agreement to sell a box of cabbage for $10, but by the end of the day the market clearing price is $8 per box, and he is forced to give up those $2 in order to keep buyers coming back to the market. That price unpredictability would be okay if he benefited from the up-side as often as he suffered from the down-side, but the reality is that if he makes an agreement to sell at $10 and the price goes up to $12 over the course of the day, he is stuck with his original deal. Hoeffner sells at the Wholesale Farmers’ Market because here, at least, the spot market for his products exists and he takes what he can get, without the risk of his buyers renegotiating a price.

The Greenmarket gives these farmers, many of whom are beyond middle age, access to marketing and sales opportunities that they would otherwise lack. These are not guys who are going to serve the unique needs of dozens of different buyers or contract their production with big companies, but they do want to sell in a fair and efficient way to customers that value their products. The market succeeds at pulling farmers and buyers together, but as Shayna Cohen, who organized the event, pointed out, growing the market is “a chicken and egg thing.” You don’t get farmers to come to the market unless there are buyers, and buyers won’t be there unless the farmers are.

Talking with Hoeffner exposes how much dissonance there is between farmers’ ability to sell fresh, whole foods and apparent demand for it. Restaurant buyers may claim to want seasonal, local produce on their menus, but the reality is that buying from nearby farmers a few months of the year can jeopardize relationships with national distributors that deliver peaches and tomatoes all year round. “When you farm, you sell what the farm gives up,” Hoeffner says. This mentality of taking what the land, and hence the market, offers does not extend to most restaurant buyers and consumers. We have been conditioned to expect that we can get what we want, when we want it.

Back home in Brooklyn, it’s easy to think that the future of healthy, whole food and efficient markets for that food are in our immediate future, and it’s easy to forget that the farmers we rely on for that food face an uncertain future. From day to day, they don’t know who will be at the markets and how much those customers will need. From week to week, they don’t know what crop prices will do, so they guess at the most advantageous times to harvest and sell their products. From year to year, they try to compete with huge makers and movers of food.

If we are going to strengthen and promote a network of regional foodsheds, not to the absolute exclusion of broader trade but with a core value of ensuring stable farm communities in proximity to our cities, we need to rethink how we define a dependable food supply. Does dependability mean getting the same assortment of products day in and day out, or does it mean having the agility to respond to the market, the season, and the farmer to incorporate a changing array of foods into our lives and menus?

Instead of trying to control and correct for diversity in our food supply, we should embrace it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should never, ever eat pineapple in January. I’m saying that to revitalize small- and medium-sized farms in this country, we first have to shift our mental models, accept some degree of variation in our food supply, and adjust accordingly our expectations of what farmers like Hoeffner and his cohorts deliver.

Open Data in Agriculture and Why It Matters

The farmer usually knows best – for his or her land, crop, livestock, and profitability, among other things. As a girl on a Minnesota farm in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was in awe of my grandfather’s ability to know just what his beef cattle needed – more water, richer pasture, better nutrients – and to have a crop rotation schedule seemingly in his head. It was as though my Granddad could feel his way through the unpredictability of weather, supply and demand, and price fluctuations to make the optimal decisions for his operation.

A couple of years ago I was with him on his farm when the cows were getting checked for pregnancy. He sat in the middle of the cattle yard while cow after cow ran through the chute. After each check, the cowboy gave a signal to indicate the cow’s status, and Granddad jotted down on a spreadsheet the results that would later that evening get saved to someone’s hard drive. What could I build, I thought to myself, that would make this process easier, and link the data that emerged from this days-long affair with other information from the farm itself, the region, and the markets to help my family make even smarter operating choices?

It’s a question that participants from across the food sector have pondered for years, and to which new information technology is beginning to provide answers. With capabilities like social media that offers instantaneous mini-reports, remote sensing that announces field-level conditions, and user-generated mapping that offers an on-the-ground view of production, merchandising, and consumption activity, we are beginning to get the tools at our fingertips to optimize decision-making with connected, real-time information, not just intuition. Farm management software, mobile applications, and web-based tools are increasingly available to farmers around the world and present an opportunity for us to understand and act on the global interconnections among food, agriculture, water, energy, soil, farm profitability, and human nutrition as never before.

I do not want farmers’ wisdom to evaporate in the face of technology. Quite the contrary, I want that specialized knowledge of acre, crop, and herd to be augmented and preserved. Agricultural and food system data is important because it lets us see what we couldn’t see before, and in a world in which the expertise to sustain our food supply lives in the minds and senses of aging farmers, I would like to see a 21st century agricultural revolution that builds on farmers’ talent and perception to capture and interpret newly available signals from the ecosystem.

Imagine, for example, that a farmer needs to decide how much to irrigate during a drought. It's a decision that affects just his farm in the short run, but has systemic costs and benefits. If the farmer could connect historical commodity prices, weather charts, financial and environmental costs, and soil conditions to assess the trade-offs in the choice he makes, he could complement his highly refined intuition with the long-term effects that his decision has on his farm and beyond. The more widely information and tools like this are available, the more optimal decisions participants can make throughout the food system.

Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting. The USDA released its Open Government Plan in April and the possibilities the agency’s data presents for developers and entrepreneurs are many. However, there exists no single platform for coordinating the numerous strands of measurements, probabilities, risks, and fluctuations in real-time. We need to build toward a high level of integration and openness in data in order to truly be stewards of the land and sustainable producers and consumers of agricultural products.

At a time when food is becoming a political issue instead of being discussed as the fundamental need that it is, we must access competing data and analysis to inform the investment, innovation, and policy behind food production and consumption. To transform data into metrics that empower decision-making across the food system, we need to get a broad spectrum of actors in the sector to communicate and collaborate. Let this essay serve as a call for a networked food system that harnesses and applies robust information through data generation, database architecture, open research and collaboration, and agile, relevant metrics, in pursuit of more efficient, more sustainable, more productive food and farming.