#yffiw

Today was a hard day at work in the midst of a very uncertain time. Typically, we get between 5-10 orders for pickup a weekend. This weekend, we have over 30. It was a number we were completely unprepared for, with no additional marketing, social media presence, or advertising on our part.

But word of mouth is a strong factor, isn’t it? A happy customer talks about us to friends and family, and they slip that info into their back pocket for when they need something. And as grocery stores and stores like Walmart and Target run out of fresh and frozen produce, people turn to that info they’d had hidden away.

I watched as orders trickled in all week, taking note of what was coming in and in what amounts. Everything seemed normal. It wasn’t until Thursday when all hell broke loose, and before I could edit or alter the information on our website, people had ordered en masse. As I perused the orders, jotted them all down, I started to sweat.

I wasn’t going to have enough produce to fill every order, and no amount of luck could help me now.

So what do you do then? How do you take a fiasco and attempt to be fair, honest, and transparent to all of your customers?

How do you deal with a food shortage, as a small business and as a small farm?

Today, I started with the things I knew I wasn’t going to run out of: apples and an inventory of frozen fruit. With over a dozen apple varieties in cold storage, I knew what I had and what I could substitute to keep people happy. The root cellar was my next big task, and where everything started to get thorny.

The picture on the top is how many pounds of yellow cippolini and red cippolini onions I needed. The one on the bottom is a picture on the scale of how many yellow cippolini onions I actually had. So, how do you make this equal and even? Do you go by who ordered first? Do you use them for your regular and most loyal customers?

I did neither. Instead, I used rationing tactics, and calculated out how many pounds of onions each customer could get to keep things even. With 6.75 pounds of onions, that meant that each pound would be reduced to just a quarter pound each. The rest would have to be made up with something else.

So, each one pound order would have to receive a quarter pound of yellow onions, and three quarters of a pound of red. Two pound orders would get a half pound of onions, and so forth. But first, I also had to check and make sure that I had enough red onions to get me through. I had to weigh two different containers because I maxed out my scale.

Fuck.

So, I had to rearrange again. The last two orders of yellow onions ended up getting their allotted quarter pound, and was supplemented with the last of the red round onions, which thankfully hadn’t been ordered by anyone else this week. While certainly not ideal, it’s something that can be explained and—if I’m lucky—will be understood by our customers.

Storage items are a finite resource. You can’t just conjure more onions in March in Connecticut. Just like you can’t conjure more potatoes or winter squash. You have what you have, and you have to make due. Limited runs of fresh items are just as tricky.

On the top is a scale showing how much baby kale mix I harvested. It’s the last of the baby kale for the season. What’s there is there and there’s no more of it when it’s gone. It’s another item that didn’t start getting ordered until the one day that no one had the opportunity to watch the orders roll in. On the bottom, that’s how many half pound bags of it I need to fulfill my orders. I have just five pounds of kale, and I need seven. That’s not something that I can substitute out for something else. There’s no rationing this to make it even.

People know when they order that I can sub something out if I need to, and that most items are on a first-come, first-served basis, but I pride myself as a grower and a salesperson that I don’t have to rely on that often. But tomorrow, when people come to get their orders, I’m going to have to look at two customers and say, “I had a shortage of baby kale this week and can’t fulfill that for you. I can offer you these as replacements, but I can’t offer you this.”

And as a grower, that’s hard. And in times as uncertain as what we’re living, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying as a customer to be told by a grower that they’re fast running out of stock.

This weekend has wiped me out of potatoes, onions, kale, winter squash, and sweet potatoes. Just about the only things I have left to sell are apples, frozen berries, and spinach.

I am not in danger of running out of spinach.

But it’s stressful for a grower to have to juggle stock around to accommodate everyone. It’s scary for a consumer to run out of options for places to buy from. How do we make that judgement call to ration out resources with a clear conscience? (Hint: we do not, it’s not that easy, and I was naïve to think that in university.)

In my little pocket of the US, most of the farms are small (”small” being defined as under 100 acres,) and they’re also heavily diversified. (That means that we grow more than one thing.) You’re very seldom going to find a farm that grows just sweet corn; you’re more likely that they’ll be growing some sweet corn, some tomatoes, some feed corn, and some peppers.

So, it’s important to think about where your story is set and why your character is there. For fantasy, this doesn’t really matter too much; you’re making the rest of the rules for the universe anyway, so the character’s motivations are entirely up to you. But if it’s supposed to be contemporary, you’ve got some research ahead of you.

For example, on under fifty acres, we grow apples, Asian pears, peaches, plums, nectarines, blueberries, summer and fall raspberries, herbs, cut flowers, and vegetables. We do that because we run a pick your own operation for (most of) the fruit, and use the vegetables to fuel our farmer’s market and CSA business. (Don’t worry, we’ll cover sales in a different entry.)

So knowing your character’s market is a big deal. 

And knowing what they’re planting is also a big deal. If they’ve been farming a long time, when talking to characters who either work for them or who also farm, they’re going to use a lot of crop names. And crop names are fun as hell.

And I’m not talking about calling tomatoes just “tomatoes.” The longer you farm, the more oddly specific you get when you’re talking about your crops. “Yeah, we ran out of seeds for this red tomato, so we subbed it with this other one instead. Doesn’t taste very good, though,” isn’t something you’re going to hear. BUT, “Shit, that happened to us last year. We ran out of Primo Red seed, so we had to sub it out for Mountain Fresh. It looks real nice but damn does it taste like shit,” is something way more likely to be said. If the reader knows that the conversation is already about tomatoes, then knowing the variety names is going to help your reader know that the Primo is the better option. And before you ask, both of those names are real variety names. 

Mountain Fresh is a nice looking tomato that stores and ships well, but its durability comes at the cost of its flavor. Primo Red is a nice, big, red tomato, but it’s delicate and doesn’t last long after you harvest it. Your character is going to have to know why they prefer one thing over the other. Are they doing a lot of wholesaling? They’re probably growing Mountain Fresh. Are they selling to local restaurants, who are using their product within the day? They’re probably growing Primo Red.

“But Lynn,” I hear you say, “I’m not clever enough to come up with names for my crops.”

That’s okay, because real crop names are hilarious and often themed.

I have cauliflower called “Amazing” and another called “Awesome.” The varieties of spinach seed I have in my seed storage include “Flamingo” and “Space,” and if you think for one damn second that I’m not going to label all my seed trays “SPAAAAACE” for the sake of me being a child you’re wrong.

Dead wrong.

One look at a seed catalog and you’re going to have the giggles for weeks. Carrots with names like “Romance” and “Goldfinger” and “Hercules” are common. (Romance is a good full size fall carrot; Hercules is a storage carrot that gets positively huge under the right conditions; Goldfinger is a great spring and early fall variety that’s slender and on the small side.) You can get a cucumber with the name “Excelsior.” Lettuce often has the names of ladies. “Nancy” and “Adriana” are both varieties we grow.

You won’t do that with everything, of course. If your character is growing herbs, you’re just calling them basil or cilantro or parsley. If you’re only growing one variety of something, you’ll call that vegetable by its name. (We only grow one variety of zucchini, so I’m not going to refer to it as “Reward.” But when we were growing two varieties, I did specify which one I was talking about. “Yo, it looks like Respect is getting obliterated with squash bugs. Reward is a couple beds over, it’s doing okay so far.”)

To wrap it up, seed names are hilarious, and each variety is unique and different in its own way, each good for a specific climate or use or bred for a certain trait. (There’s also patented seed varieties that, again, I’ll touch on in a different entry.) Your character will commonly call a vegetable by its variety name if they’re growing more than one of them, because it reduces confusion and helps ensure that everyone is on the same page. Look through a seed catalog or two and see what you find; you might even see something so laughably cool that you have to buy a packet of them for yourself!

Is there a topic that you’d like to see Your Fictional Farm is Wrong talk about? Send me an ask.