Collaborative marketing models for New England farms
New England farmers and community-based organizations are working collaboratively to aggregate and market products from multiple farms through online farmers markets, multi-farm Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, food hubs and farm stores and stands. These models have the potential to increase convenience, choice, and flexibility for customers, potentially expanding market access for small and mid-sized farms.
We organized a series of educational workshops to bring together farmers and stakeholders for peer learning and networking— synthesis and report coming soon! We are also conducting a customer survey and a comparative case study of four types of collaborative marketing models to understand common challenges and opportunities with different ways of structuring these models.
We are also coordinating a financial component to develop enterprise budgets for different types of collaborative marketing models (ie. food hubs, cooperative multi-farm CSAs, farm stores, etc.) to answer the following questions:
What pinch points are most challenging to the financial viability of the different models?
How will changes in different parts of the operation impact their financial viability?
What adjustments/investments could result in the highest return on investment?
This project is funded by the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education program, grant # LNE22-436-AWD0000049 and the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station, Award # NH00695-M.