Yellow Barn Farm's model for a local food economy.
If you have been following our journey over the last year, you will hopefully have heard a bit about our approach to growing and selling food.
We are piloting quite a few different projects here at Yellow Barn, a major one being our food delivery + food waste collection program. So what's the latest?
First year of in-ground planting has officially started! We're working out the kinks to bring farm fresh produce to the community over the season.
We completed our 4 week Prepared Meals program with Food Bridge (with ingredients sourced from YBF and other local farms!) with great results. Official program will launch in July.
We are working on sourcing more local products from farms, ranches, and small businesses to list in the Stalk Market Store.
Produce from YBF and samples from Food Bridge will be available for purchase at our first Farm Hop & Farm Fest of the season (June 25)
During our Prepared Meals pilot program, 100% of purchases were for pickup.
This was surprising to us, and really made us think about what we were planning to offer with the food delivery aspect of our program.
Which is why we wanted to take a second to discuss...why delivery?
Dedicated members = predictable growing quantities. We are designing our grow operations to feed no more than 150 member households, which means we will have clear predictions on how much of what we need to grow to feed our community.
Pickup increases traffic on the farm, requires intensive storage infrastructure, and necessitates someone to attend the farm stand all day to process sporadic pickups.
Delivery allows us to collect food waste to close the loop on food + scraps AND creates a valuable resource for feeding pigs and creating compost for the gardens.
Income opportunities for farmers - from seed to harvest to table, your food is handled by the same people all the way through, and creates supplemental income for helping with delivery for our farm hands.
Decrease costs for producers by batching product pickups directly from the source on the member delivery day. This means that they're saving precious time and money not needing to deliver to us, and we do not need to store or handle inventory until we know exactly how many orders are placed.
We have thought long and hard about how to structure to the delivery program to be reasonably priced, cover all our costs and start to bring in a healthy revenue stream for the farm and our farm hands, as well as be something that helps our local producers get their products out without needing to leave their work in the busy season.
Final thoughts...
While we have not fully launched the Stalk Market membership quite yet as we dial in our food and produce offerings, we invite you to sign up for our Compost Membership, where you get weekly food scrap pickups + delivery on eggs and other non-perishable goods from the Stalk Market Store.
Our service area is any household within a 10-15 minute radius of Yellow Barn Farm. If you have a couple neighbors who would be willing to sign up with you, contact us for a group discount code!
Upgrading to the Stalk Market membership will be easy once we are fully up and running. We will be inviting the Compost Members to register first, then opening it to the Food Program Survey participants based on proximity to the farm.
We so appreciate the support and are so excited to share this journey with our community. It has been quite an adventure, with no shortage of road bumps and learning curves, but none of us here would rather be doing anything else.
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