Athens Locally Grown

How to contact us:
Our Website: athens.locallygrown.net
On Twitter: @athlocallygrown
On Facebook: www.facebook.com/athenslocallygrown
On Thursdays: Here’s a map.

Market News

First off this week, I’ve got a big announcement. I’ve been putting a lot of hours into the website lately to make it even easier for you to pay for your orders. We’ve had the means for a long time to accept account payments via PayPal, and then let you draw down over time, but that was really a cumbersome process for everyone involved, and then there’s the fact that PayPal itself is kind of a loose cannon, and not at all someone I really trusted with money. They just happened to be the best of a bad bunch.

Well, now there’s someone much better. Much like Square has made it simple to take credit card payments in person (those tiny swipers we use at the payment table), a newish company called Stripe has made it easy to take payments online. Not only were their systems simple to hook into ours on the back end, but they’ve eliminated all of the extra fees and special accounts one used to need to take credit and debit cards. Starting today, you can now tie a credit or debit card to your Athens Locally Grown account. You only have to enter it once (on a totally secure page, of course), and from then on you’ll be able to essentially tell us to charge it to your card. Right now, you can use that card to put money into your account, and any orders you place will draw down from that balance. In the near future (hopefully next week), you’ll be able to even more simply click a “Put it on my card” button when you check out, and then on Thursday night (after you pick up your order and we know exactly what you did and didn’t get) you’ll be charged for exactly what you received.

If you’d like to start using this, head over to the Your Account page of the site, where you’ll see a new “Payment Options” section. You can put your card on file now, and then immediately use it to pay into your ALG account, or just keep it there until I get the pay-per-order parts all hooked up.

I never see your card numbers, of course, and everything’s encrypted and secured as safe as can be. We can now take all Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club cards on the website. All this security and convenience does cost us, though, so we will add on a 3% “Online Payment Convenience Fee” that will get added on to your payment, if you choose to use that route. But then again, you’ll get to totally skip the payment line when you pick up on Thursdays, too.

This is the first step in making payments easier for all of us. After I get the pay-per-order system working, I plan on integrating with another fairly new company called Dwolla, who aims to make online payments as simple as cash. They’ll let you hook a bank account directly up to your ALG account, and draft payments that way like you were writing a check, cutting the credit card companies out of the picture entirely. The already have smartphone apps, so if that idea interests you, you can already pay us in person through your phone. Finally, I may put back in a direct hook for PayPal if there’s a demand for it, but they’re my least favorite option (did you hear about the antique violin they made a buyer destroy a couple weeks ago?).

Now, in the past few weeks I’ve talked about the legal organization and considerations behind our market and then the financial operation that keeps everything running. I’ll wrap up my yearly primer on Athens Locally Grown this week with a few words about our growers and other market vendors.

First and foremost, let me preface everything by saying the decision to let a new grower into the market is always made by me alone. I know many farmers markets often get some press regarding one vendor or another feeling left out of the market and complaining that the committee running that market was a little too closed. Well, my efforts to run ALG in a cooperative manner aside, the responsibility here comes back to me. There’s no committee, and no formal application process. I’ve had some potential vendors that I’ve rejected get upset with me and complain that ALG is a “closed” market, and they’re right. It is a closed market in that it’s not open to just anyone to sell through. That doesn’t mean we have arbitrary standards, of course, and actually I think I’ve set the bar pretty high. A good number of our growers also go above and beyond to only bring “the best of the best”, and that pushes the standards even higher. Here’s a summary of what it takes to be able to sell through Athens Locally Grown:

• All growers must use sustainable practices and never use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. I’ll come back to this later.
• All growers can only sell what they themselves have grown, made, or otherwise produced
• All growers must be from the greater Athens area. Right now, this means within about 75 miles
• All animals raised for meat or eggs must be pastured or sustainably wild-caught
• Handicrafts must be made primarily from items produced or gathered on the farm
• Prepared foods must use organic ingredients if at all possible, and locally grown ingredients if at all possible
• All proper licenses, when required by law, must be obtained

That about covers everything, I think. When I’ve turned down requests to sell through ALG (and I turn down several monthly), the items clearly broke one or more of those standards. There are a few edge cases that I take on a case by case basis. Coffee is one. 1000 Faces was our first coffee vendor, and they offered direct trade coffees (they purchased directly from the coffee growers with no distributor or middle man) and did all the roasting and packaging themselves and to order. That set the standard, and other coffee vendors (such as GranCoffee Roasting Co.) have to match it. Mills Farm was a founding ALG member, but they buy in organic grains for their mill. We now have Sylvan Falls Mill in Rabun Gap as a vendor, and they primarily buy their grains from local (to them) organic growers. From now on, all future millers wanting to sell through ALG will have to meet that standard. And so on.

Let me get back to that first requirement: “sustainable practices”. There’s no set definition of that, and there’s really a sliding scale. For example, I sometimes use a gasoline-powered rototiller, and our no-till growers and the no-hydrocarbon growers would frown upon that. There is a generally accepted definition of what is “conventional” agriculture, and that includes the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and confined and grain-fed animals. Those are easy to exclude. At the other end, there is the USDA Organic Certification and Certified Naturally Grown certification. Few small diversified growers can meet the expense of USDA certification, but a good number of our growers are CNG certified. This program uses the USDA rules as a starting point, made a few things more strict, and uses a system of growers certifying other growers to keep things honest. My farm has been CNG certified for nine years (though I dropped my certification last year simply because my garden got really, really small), and many others area farms have followed since then. If a new grower does not have a certification, then I talk to them, get information about them, and visit their farm in person when necessary. A good number of our growers were ALG customers long before growing for market themselves, so I’ve gotten to know the people and the decision to let them in was easy.

In short: the growers have satisfied my standards, and I personally have approved them for inclusion in ALG. However, I want you to not just take my word for it. We have monthly farm tours during the warm seasons so you can go on-site yourself and see the farms in action. We have a semi-regular “meet the grower” table at the Thursday pickups so you can talk with the growers yourself face-to-face. We encourage them to take photos for their online photo album, to describe their practices, and to take care with their product listings. We want to facilitate communication between you and them, so when you place an order, they see your name and email address in case they need to clarify a request or offer a substitution, and likewise for most of our growers you can see their contact info when you view their grower profile (while logged into the site) so you can get clarification from them when needed.

I’m currently wrestling with some of those edge cases. There are two seafood vendors bringing fresh seafood from the Georgia coast that want in. I can’t yet personally vouch for the fishing practices of the boats, though, so I’ve not yet said yes. There is a small sustainable dairy that would like to sell, but they’re just a bit too far away for my liking. However, they could provide some products that you can’t currently get. And there are several prepared food vendors that sell at some of the Atlanta farmers markets that would like to come to Athens and sell. They too offer products you cant get in Athens, but I’m cautious about opening those floodgates too wide. What do you think? I’m always interested in your feedback, and if you think I’m being too cautious and should just let some of these farther-away vendors in, by all means, let me know. I know of naturally grown, Georgia grown sugar cane and olives. Organic straight-from-the-farmer Florida citrus could be had, too. Let me know!

Hopefully that explains how our growers get into ALG, what standards they have to meet, and so on. It’s a very important topic, perhaps the most important one for our market, but much of it goes on behind the scenes. I know you’ve put your trust in me, and I take that very seriously, If you’d like to talk with me in person about this or any other aspects of ALG, I’d love to do so. Just pull me aside when you come by to pick up your order.

Thanks so much for your support of Athens Locally Grown, all of our growers, local food, and our rights to eat it. You all are part of what makes Athens such a great area in which to live. We’ll see you on Thursday at Ben’s Bikes at the corner of Pope and Broad Streets from 4:30 to 8pm!

Other Area Farmers Markets

The Athens Farmers Market has closed for the winter. You can watch for news during the offseason on their website. The other area markets are also all closed for the season too. All but Athens Locally Grown, that is.

Please support your local farmers and food producers, where ever you’re able to do so!

We thank you for your interest and support of our efforts to bring you the healthiest, the freshest and the most delicious locally-produced foods possible!