The Weblog

The Online Market is open for ordering from 8 AM Wednesday till 8 PM on Thursday.
Spring time is upon us again. The planting of vegetables and flowers is in full spead as we work to provide an aboundance of fresh new products. Please feel free to make your selections from the great products available this week.

Remember the New Customer Referral Program
From March 20 through June 30

How it Works
1. Tell a friend about the CUMMING HARVEST farmers market.
2. Have them register at cumming.locallygrown.net. (the market managers will contact all new customers to ask who referred them)
3. After their third purchase (3 different weeks), your credit will be applied to your account.
Thank you for sharing your love of healthy food and for helping to support our local growers!

Stephen Daniels
770-905-9155



 
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This Week at The Cumming Harvest


This Week

I’m devoting the newsletter these first few weeks of the year to documenting in detail just how TCH works. I’ll spend some time next week talking about how growers get allowed in the market, and what standards they have to meet. But this week, I’ll get into the details of how the market sustains itself financially.

First off, we’re legally a sole proprietorship, and the market is owned and operated by me. It has never legally been organized as a co-op, though it’s always run in a cooperative spirit and it’s commonly referred to as the co-op.

We’re not a non-profit, either, but we’ve structured things so that over time the market can just barely cover its own expenses. Just like all of our member farms are sustainable growers, the market itself needs to be sustainable. So how do we cover its expenses? One small way is through the memberships you pay. The $25 a year you give to the market is enough to cover the costs of having customers: banking fees from depositing your checks, paper and ink for printing, web hosting fees, and that sort of thing. We currently have 146 paid members out of the 1602 active accounts on the website.

By far the bulk of our funding comes from the growers themselves. They generally pay a 10% commission on their sales through the site. This money covers the the food allowance we offer our volunteers, rent and utilities at Holy Spirit church, etc. During the slow parts of the year, the sales are usually not enough to cover our weekly costs, but in the busy times (late fall and early spring, for us) there is extra. If we plan things out well, it pretty much all evens out in the end.

The growers get paid out of the shared cashbox for their week’s sales when they drop off their items. Then, you arrive and pay into the cashbox for your order. I post date the checks to give me time to rush to the bank to deposit the money to cover the checks we just wrote to the growers (money you pay via credit cards takes up to a week to reach our account). As explained elsewhere on the website, you are really ordering directly from and paying the growers yourself, but our shared cashbox system makes things convenient for you and them. (Imagine if you ordered from ten growers having to write ten checks when you picked up your items!) This shared cashbox system has so far satisfied the tax man, but it does mean that if you place an order and then never arrive to pick it up, we’re left holding the bag. For that reason, you are responsible for paying for orders not picked up, and that amount is automatically added on to your next order for your convenience.

That’s how we operate financially. Our market might be more expensive to run than a traditional “booths and tables” farmers market, but that price buys a system that’s simple, time-saving, and flexible.

Pick-Up

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

To view the harvest today and tomorrow till 8pm, visit “The Market” page on our website, The Cumming Harvest

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!