Getting what you pay for: Customers weigh costs, benefits of sustainable farming

Every Saturday, farmer Liz Graznak and her staff begin their day before dawn, loading a trailer full of organic produce, eggs and flowers. They pull out of Happy Hollow Farm in Jamestown at around 5 a.m.

Upon arriving at the Columbia Farmers Market, the crew sets up the farm’s signature bright orange tents and unloads the day's offering while hoping a little of it comes back with them.

“For 52 days a year, and only four hours on each of those days, I have to make my living,” Graznak said.

Graznak spends the morning answering customers' questions, suggesting items to try and restocking tables. How well the products sell depends on a variety of factors — the weather, the college football schedule and price.

Graznak sells the majority of her produce direct to consumers at the market and through a CSA, or community supported agriculture — a model in which customers pay an upfront share into a local farm and receive boxes of its products, often produce, regularly throughout the season.

Happy Hollow is an organic farm, meaning Graznak doesn’t use synthetic chemicals and farms with an eye toward the environment, which ultimately raises her cost of production — costs she has to pass on to the customer.

“I charge what I charge so that I can pay my employees a living wage… so that I can afford to pay my electric bill and put gas and diesel in my trucks,” Graznak said. “There's no extra. It's not like there's profit rolling in.”

For more small, environmentally sustainable farms like Happy Hollow to thrive, they need customers, a majority of whom don't necessarily want to pay a premium for veggies at a time when food prices are already high.

Graznak said she fields questions about food prices.

“For whatever reason, people don't want to pay for food,” Graznak said. “When they go to the grocery store and they see that the price is 35 cents more, they don't want to pay it. And in the last two years, the price has gone up on everything.”

Cost paramount among consumer values

Joseph Balagtas is a Purdue University professor of agriculture economics and the director of the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability, which tracks and measures consumer behavior as it relates to food markets.

“Consumer behavior is a huge driver of what's happening in food and agricultural markets, and we ought to know more about it,” Balagtas said.

Since January 2022, the center has been conducting a national survey of grocery shoppers called the Consumer Food Insights report.

Each month Balagtas and his colleagues ask customers what they prioritize when they’re buying food — taste, nutrition, environmental impact, affordability, availability or social responsibility.

Although there is a common belief that consumers want sustainable products, Balagtas said, each month, on average, environmental impact falls behind taste and affordability.

“It's not that people don't care about sustainability, it's that it's not the first thing,” he said. “It's not the most important thing to us.”

The third most important food value to customers, according to the survey, is availability.

“The price has to be right, and I have to be able to find it at the grocery store when I go shopping,” Balagtas said.

In August, Balagtas also surveyed consumers about regenerative agriculture — a movement that encourages environmentally sustainable farming practices — and found that 72% support it.

“We ask consumers, ‘Would you support regenerative agriculture if you have to pay higher prices for food?’” Balagtas said.

In follow-up questions, Balagtas asked consumers if they would support regenerative agriculture if it meant that food had to cost more, and support dropped to 51%.

He also asked if consumers would support regenerative agriculture if it required government subsidies to help farmers transition to sustainable methods, and support was 55%.

“When you start confronting consumers with the fact that it's going to cost something, support drops for regenerative agriculture, and that's important,” Balagtas said.

Sharing the bounty and the challenges

Liz Graznak didn’t grow up thinking she’d be a farmer.

“The concept of owning and operating a farm was completely out of my wheelhouse,” she said.

During graduate school, Graznak became a CSA member, and the mission of connecting with and investing in a local farmer was so effective, she became one herself.

Getting customers to buy into local, small-scale, environmentally-sustainable farms and farmers on the front end of the process has long been the goal of community supported agriculture, or CSA.

Clare Stoner Fehsenfeld is the executive director of FairShare CSA Coalition, a Wisconsin-based organization that’s been assisting CSA farmers for 30 years. She said through CSA, community members can become invested stakeholders in a nearby farm.

“You sign up at the beginning of the season and give a check to your farm, so you're investing in the farm for the season,” Stoner Fehsenfeld said. “Then you kind of share in the bounty and the challenges.

That bounty is most commonly a weekly box of fruits, veggies, eggs, milk or meat — a share of what the farmer produces.

Over time consumers have grown more accustomed to convenience and choice, which ultimately hurts the direct-to-consumer model of a CSA.

“People want convenience and the idea that we can pick and choose anything we want online,” Stoner Fehsenfeld said.

Stoner Fehsenfeld said the attitudes about CSA from customers can be a bit more transactional now, more about accessing produce than investing in a farmer.

Graznak has tried to meet those convenience and choice expectations for customers by investing in a software program that allows them to build their weekly farm box online. Traditionally, boxes are packed by what’s available and in season.

“They do have the choice of saying, ‘I don't really want the turnips this week. I'd rather have more peppers,’” Graznak said.

But, the platform costs a few hundred dollars a month, something Graznak anticipates she’ll eventually have to pass on to customers.

Community supported agriculture aims to give everyone a stake in the ups and downs of farming — if a pest takes out an entire crop of broccoli, there’s no broccoli that season.

“I still love the concept of CSA, and I want CSA to work, like my whole being wants CSA to work,” Graznak said. “But if I was being super realistic, it's not working. There aren't enough customers that want to eat that way.”

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Additionally, the upfront cost of a farm share is a barrier.

“The model in itself, is intrinsically challenging to people who have more limited income or live in an area where they can't access food very easily,” Stoner Fehsenfeld said. “So paying up front at the beginning of the season, that's really tricky.”

FairShare CSA Coalition now provides cost assistance for low-income households who want to participate in community supported agriculture to address the equity challenges to the model. The program fills up every year, evidence that many consumers do want local, sustainably produced food.

“I think that the more consumers who care about this stuff, the more farms there can be,” Stoner Fehsenfeld said.

The value of good food

After 14 years, Liz Graznak and Happy Hollow Farm are a staple at the Columbia Farmers Market. The bright orange tents that identify the farm were originally a gift from her sister, Graznak said, that has since grown into their brand.

Part of her job every Saturday is to help customers understand the true value of what she grows. Through conversations at the market, as well as in the farm’s website and newsletter, Graznak aims to teach consumers about the cost of managing an organic agriculture operation.

But if a customer is stuck on price, there’s little she can do.

“I'm certainly not going to change their mind in the five seconds that I have to talk to them at the farmers market,” she said.

At noon, the market closes and the Happy Hollow crew packs the trailer, takes a rough inventory and heads back to the farm tucked away in the Missouri River Valley for a cold beverage.

Although she calls it a “very, very hard” way to make a living, at the end of the day, Graznak cares about offering food to her community that is locally grown and good for both you and the environment.

“Our life is all about community, isn't it? It's all about the people we know. It's all about the impacts that we have with one another,” she said. “People need to eat, and I want people to eat healthy food.”

She believes the value of that matches its price.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Customers like sustainable farming — but cost is still king