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The Cumming Harvest
thecummingharvest@live.com
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This Week

Happy New Year!

The market is open today and tomorrow for your ordering.

My Daily Bread is back this week.

Each January, I devote the first few mailings of the year to the behind the scenes operation of TCH. This week, I’m going to talk about the many legal issues surrounding our market. Even though many people call us “the co-op”, TCH is legally a market owned and operated by me. There’s no board of directors, no shield corporation, no pot of grant money. It’s just me, and while that keeps things very simple, it also exposes me and my family to a ton of potential liability. It’s never really been an issue and there are several things I do specifically to minimize that risk:

• The growers list their own items and set their own prices. When you buy from them, it is from them, not from me, and not from Athens Locally Grown.

• The Cumming Harvest never takes ownership or possession of the food. The growers drop it off, and you pick it up.

• Everything at the market has a customer’s name attached to it when it arrives. TCH does not repackage any items or buy in bulk for redistribution.

• When you pay, you’re paying in to a shared cash box for all of the growers. This lets you write a single check or swipe your card once for convenience, but you are really paying all of the growers directly and individually. Your money goes in, and the software keeps everything going, spits out checks for each of the growers you buy from.

• The growers give a small percentage of their sales, generally 10%, back to the market to cover the many expenses of keeping the market going. I’ll cover the details of finances another week.

• TCH never buys from a grower and resells the items to you.

• When a grower sells items that need licenses from either the state or the federal government, TCH verifies that the proper licenses have been obtained.

The ownership issue is key. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t offer delivery, and why we usually can’t hold items for you if you aren’t able to pick up your orders. Delivery might be a good business for someone (if they could figure out all the legal requirements), but it’s not at all what I personally want to be into. I think it would be a valuable service for you, and I’m hoping someday someone will be able to partner with me for this. Many food co-ops and even some farmers markets aren’t as careful with keeping ownership as straight as I try to be, and that has gotten other groups similar to us into serious legal trouble (deserved or not) over the years. There are so many grey areas in all this, and the written regulations still don’t even consider that something like The Cumming Harvest might exist. We’re so firmly in the grey areas with most everything we do that it’s just too risky for me to bring us into the areas that are clearly black.

So, these are the sorts of things that guide my thinking as The Cumming Harvest has grown over the years. Everything we do has legal ramifications, and the state of Georgia has a reputation for being no nonsense when it comes to enforcement — with the little guy, anyway.

I’ll continue more of the financial info in the coming weeks.

Pick-Up

Market Location and Pick Up
724 Pilgrim Mill Road, Cumming, GA 30040
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