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WARSAW – I stared at the red and green stalks and wondered whether there was a trick for selecting the best rhubarb.
It was just a few hours earlier that I even remembered what the vegetable looked like. I certainly didn’t feel confident choosing the best pieces for a stranger’s strawberry-rhubarb pie.
Thank goodness that was the trickiest question I fielded while working at a Kosciusko County Farmers Market booth. Market veteran Tracey Hall bailed me out, deftly plucking three stalks from the pile.
Hall’s mother, Pam Roberts, had invited me to see how her family prepares for the market and to experience it for myself. The family’s Pierceton farm, the Olde Farmhouse, sells produce, meat, eggs and baked goods at the Kosciusko County Farmers Market three days a week.
Customers also stop by the Pierceton farm to buy staples, so I figured the Roberts clan had the expertise to teach me about selling farm products directly to the public. Roberts’ husband and five children all play or have played a role in the farm, which evolved from the children’s 4-H projects.
By the time I arrived at the farm, most of the market preparation was already finished. Pam Roberts was removing an angel food cake from a pan and packaging it for sale. She uses the farm’s eggs to make bread, cake and pasta in her certified kitchen. She started baking for the 2:30 p.m. market 10 hours earlier. The bread’s scent made my mouth water, and I wound up buying a loaf to take home.
After she finished baking, Roberts and her family picked broccoli, rhubarb and several lettuce varieties. Produce-filled trays were waiting inside the cool house to prevent the lettuce from wilting in the 90-degree heat.
But most of the Olde Farmhouse’s vegetables won’t be ready for a few more weeks, Pam Roberts said. About 30,000 onions, 1,000 broccoli plants and 600 pepper plants that filled the farm’s fields were still ripening. When a customer later asked whether she had any zucchini, Roberts smiled and said the tiny vegetables were only about 3 inches long and not ready to be picked.
But the Olde Farmhouse had plenty of meat and eggs to supplement the produce. We grabbed two of the coolers stacked alongside the house and started packing. Brown eggs from the farm’s 250 laying hens filled one cooler. T-bone steaks, pork chops and other cuts from the farm’s livestock – all hormone- and antibiotic-free – occupied the other.
Pam Roberts added a few jars of honey from the farm’s bees and freezer jam made with the family’s strawberries to the pile.
“It’s kind of hard trying to guess what everyone wants,” she said.
Market traffic had been light on Mondays and Wednesdays, Roberts said. She brought 20 quarts of strawberries to the market one Monday and only sold three. Roberts had to haul the rest back home.
We loaded the coolers, the produce, some noodles, bread and cakes into the pickup for the trip to the market. After the drive to the county fairgrounds, the goods had to be unloaded and arranged. The family will bring a box truck full of products at the summer’s height. Hall and her husband, Derek Hall, usually help Roberts man the booth.
I had wondered how farmers determine what price to charge. Roberts priced most of the produce using signs she had made for past markets, but she acknowledged the process is a guessing game. Farmer’s market vendors consult one another if they aren’t sure what to charge for a specific item.
Pricing the broccoli caused Roberts and Hall, her daughter, the most difficulty. There was no sign for that vegetable, and Roberts was trying to remember what they charged last season. The pair finally settled on 80 cents a pound. Scott’s Food & Pharmacy at Georgetown Square was charging $2.08 for a bunch of broccoli last week.
Despite temperatures in the 90s, customers started examining the produce 15 minutes before the market’s official Wednesday afternoon start time. I was surprised that about 10 people were waiting to shop when Hall let me ring a bell to announce the market’s opening. The early birds snapped up several bags of lettuce and broccoli.
Selling lettuce was easy because it was already packaged and priced. But broccoli needed to be bagged and weighed on a scale so a price could be set. Roberts had empty milk jugs stuffed with plastic grocery bags for just this purpose. After each customer selected broccoli, we bagged it, placed it on the scale and typed in the price. The scale calculated the amount owed, and we rounded the price down to the nearest nickel.
After an hour, the Olde Farmhouse booth had rung up $46 in sales. The farmer’s market booth can sell enough beef, pork and produce to earn $650 on a busy Saturday at the season’s height, Roberts said.
Roberts said she did not know how much revenue the farm earns a year. The farm’s income is divided among the family members who are active in the operation – Roberts and her husband, Jim, as well as their four youngest children. The couple’s oldest daughter, Angie, moved to Illinois and is no longer involved with the farm.
Meat sales bring in the most income because the product costs more. Roberts sold pork chops for $2.99 a pound during the market.
“It’s in clear packaging so you can see what you’re getting,” she told the customers.
Any market leftovers return to the Olde Farmhouse’s certified kitchen freezer and refrigerator. If Roberts’ angel food cakes and other baked goods do not sell by the following day, they wind up on the family’s dinner table.
Eating leftovers is part of the farm’s philosophy to make the most of its resources. The bees that pollinate the produce also make their own farm product – honey. And Roberts incorporates the honey and some of the 240 to 300 eggs the farm’s chickens lay daily into her baking.
The rewards in this business aren’t all monetary, as I learned from my farmer’s market visit. Many shoppers were visibly delighted to be buying freshly picked produce and homemade baked goods direct from the Olde Farmhouse. They marveled at the homemade noodles and beautiful angel food cakes.
They eagerly asked when still-maturing produce such as sweet corn and jalapeno peppers would be available. These interactions keep Roberts returning to the market each week.
“We want to give people fresh produce at a fair price,” she said.
