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Be
a price sleuth for the Grassroots OPX™
and get our Reporters’ GIFT BONANZA!
T-shirt, hat, notepad, pencil and patch—you’ll
be the envy of your community as you walk the aisles of your
local farmers market.
Put your favorite market in the index.
E-mail associate editor Amanda:
March 23, 2004: The Grassroots OPX™
is a weekly update featuring retail prices for sustainably
raised, heirloom and organic produce and products from farmers
markets around the country. We run it every week of the farmers
market season, starting May 1 and ending some time around
Thanksgiving.
And how do we gather these street-level prices paid by real
people for real food? We look to our volunteer corps of farmers
market reporters. Their faithful work and observations create
the numbers and insights that make the Grassroots OPX so valuable.
And where do these faithful reports come from? They come
from the 90,000 or so regular visitors to The New Farm®
web site.
And why are we telling you this now? Because we have a dream,
and we need your help with it. We’d like to have numbers
on at least two farmers markets in every state of the union.
That means we need at least 100 people to volunteer around
two hours a week during the market season to gather numbers
for us, at the producers’ only market where they sell,
or buy.
As a reward for your effort—in addition to the gratitude
of thousands—you’ll get the full NewFarm.org Gift
Bonanza which includes a 100% organic cotton tee, a 100% organic
cotton cap, a recycled currency pencil and a handy-dandy notepad
all with The New Farm logo (photo coming soon!). Talk about
a deal. Just e-mail The New Farm associate editor Amanda Kimble-Evans
at
and let her know you’re interested.
Want to see prices and reporters from 2003? Check our our
Grassroots OPX Archive.
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Real
prices. Real food. Real community.
The GRASSROOTS OPX™
Setting prices for sustainably raised and organic
vegetables, fruits and value-added products always
poses a dilemma.
How can you tell customers enough of the “story”
of your well-farmed crop to explain all the benefits
that come with a tomato, a jar of jam or an heirloom
eggplant. How can they understand how much more
they are getting in this local food transaction
than they get from the grocery store at the end
of the industrial food chain?
You want your customers to compare “food
system for food system,” not “apples
for apples.”
The right price for farmers at a market reflects
a mix of their cost of production, seasonal factors,
what else is for sale, the quality/variety of
the offerings, and the preferences and spending
habits of the market’s full range of customers.
The certified organic wholesale produce prices
at our OPX provide a sense of the premiums that
organic gets for the uniform, processed and packaged
products sold at the wholesale level. For street-level
prices, you need more than prices. You need an
understanding of the market, its location, its
clientele and the weekly variables that influence
price and offerings. That’s what our corps
of volunteers do each week. Look for it, starting
in early May. Better yet, be a volunteer price
reporter yourself. Just email New Farm associate
editor Amanda Kimble-Evans at
and let her know you’re interested.
The coming season’s Grassroots OPX will
be all new and improved. You’ll be able
to compare the products and prices at two specific
markets, look at prices from all the markets in
a given state, or look at the prices for select
products from all markets around the country!
Put your favorite market
in the index.
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To visit the full OPX™ or OPX™
Plus, click on the links below:
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