Farmers, it seems, have always lived with tight margins and boom/bust cycles. The market turmoil caused by decline of the U.S. housing and manufacturing sectors, along with continued volatility in energy prices, give people who raise food for a living an incentive to diversify their income.
Luckily numerous trends in marketing and agriculture support opportunities to create new farm income streams. These include agritourism, community-supported agriculture, organic agriculture, the “locavore” and sustainability movements, grassfed beef, farmer’s markets, online shopping, and ecosystem markets.
Agritourism is exactly what it sounds like: farms as travel destinations. Agritourism offerings run the gamut from working farms that allow visitors or U-pick opportunities to those focusing primarily on the educational and gastronomic experiences of their guests.
Community-supported agriculture, or CSA, is a system that allows customers to sign up to “pre-purchase,” directly from the farm, a set amount of seasonal produce throughout the growing season while cutting out the middle man.
Food Hubs are "business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution, and marketing of course-identified food products primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail, and institutional demand." According to the USDA’s Regional Food Hub Resource Guide.
Organic agriculture and grass-fed beef are part of the broader movement toward more holistic or non-chemical intensive forms of agriculture. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, “the demand for organically produced goods has shown double-digit growth for well over a decade.”
Farmers markets have also been rapidly increasing in popularity over the past decades. They provide yet another venue for farmers to bypass the middle man and not only sell directly to consumers, but form relationships. Part of the “locavore” movement, to eat locally grown seasonal produce, puts an emphasis on “knowing your farmer,” and farmer’s markets are uniquely suited to this task.
Many producers of goods and services, including farmers, are harnessing the vast power of the internet at an accelerating pace to market and sell their goods to a previously unreachable audience. A key component that allows supermarkets or restaurants to meet the consumer demand for local, organic, or sustainable agricultural products is their ability to find adequate production sources within a given geographic area. Services to assist both producers and consumers in finding one another on the internet, such as the Land Conservation Assistance Network and affiliated state sites are increasing exponentially. One site focusing specifically on Arkansas is the Arkansas MarketMaker.