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The Cumming Harvest
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Carrell Farms & Buffalo Gal will be delivering your orders this week.

Indian Creek Angus will begin delivering on the first Saturday of each month. Their next delivery is March 1. They will continue listing their available cuts and you can order and prepay anytime throughout the month until their delivery date.

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Market Location and Pick Up
724 Pilgrim Mill Road, Cumming, GA 30040
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The Cumming Harvest
thecummingharvest@live.com
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SUPER BOWL WEEKEND
My Daily Bread All these items are $1 off this week.
Buffalo Blue Cheese and Beer Buzzed Dip
Hot Pepper Peach Cheese Log
Greek Pasta Salad
Bagels
Sourdough Rounds (for dipping)

Heritage Farm
Take a look at the sales on Chicken and Sausage being offered by Heritage Farm for Super Bowl Sunday!

Carrell Farms & Buffalo Gal will be delivering on February 11th.

Doug’s Wild Alaska Sockeye Salmon will be stocking up his freezer on Friday, ready for pick up this Saturday.

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Market Location and Pick Up
724 Pilgrim Mill Road, Cumming, GA 30040
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The Cumming Harvest
thecummingharvest@live.com
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In the past two 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 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. It is a closed market, and 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 de facto standards even higher. Here’s a summary of what it takes to be able to sell through The Cumming Harvest:

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 Cumming area. Right now, this means within about 100 miles

All growers must be willing to be part of our TCH community, and not think of us as just a dumping off point.

All animals raised for meat or eggs must be pastured or sustainably wild-caught

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 TCH, the grower has clearly not met one or more of those standards. There are a few edge cases that I take on a case by case basis. Let me get back to that first requirement: “sustainable practices”. 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. 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.

In short: the growers have satisfied my standards, and I personally have approved them for inclusion in TCH. However, I want you to not just take my word for it. Feel free to go on-site yourself and see the farms in action. We have an occasional “meet the grower” table at the 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 often wrestle with some of those edge cases. Doug’s Wild Alaska Salmon was one such case. The salmon and halibut they sell was caught in Alaska, but Doug and his family live here (well, just over the line in South Carolina). They own their own small boats, and catch the fish themselves. Their practices are certified sustainable by a reputable organization up there, and their products are high quality. They’ve worked out the logistics of getting fish to you every week (by keeping a supply at the market in a freezer they own). Often, the logistics of getting more of a variety of items from there to here on a regular and timely basis is what breaks down, but I hope that over time we’ll be able to expand the items at our market without compromising our community of growers located right here.

Hopefully that explains how our growers get into TCH, 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 TCH, I’d love to do so. Just pull me aside when you come by to pick up your order.

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

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Market Location and Pick Up
724 Pilgrim Mill Road, Cumming, GA 30040
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The Cumming Harvest
thecummingharvest@live.com
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My Daily Bread
Hot Pepper Peach Logs are $1.50 off this week.
Twinberry, Blackberry Jam, and Apple Jelly are on sale $1.00 off.

Carrell Farms
monthly delivery is this Saturday. Place your orders today for water buffalo, alpaca and/or lamb.

Ancient Awakenings
is available for ordering online and delivers this week.

Pick-Up

Market Location and Pick Up
724 Pilgrim Mill Road, Cumming, GA 30040
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The Cumming Harvest
thecummingharvest@live.com
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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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The Cumming Harvest
thecummingharvest@live.com
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Welcome back, we hope you all had a wonderful holiday week and are looking forward to the New Year!
Winter is officially here, and so the days will start getting longer once again. A few of our growers are taking time off to slow down and recharge, but we’ll be here for those who have food to offer you, and we’ll be here with our regular hours for you to get it from them. Those of you who are traveling for holidays, safe travels and we’ll see you when you return!

Pick-Up

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