On opening day in the light-filled historic Miller House in downtown Jackson, shoppers filled baskets with heirloom tomatoes, organic garlic and fresh bread. Before long, greenhouse-grown blackberries sold out.
Shopper Ben Ahrens surveyed the raw-dairy yogurt on shelves, thanks to the Wyoming Food Freedom Act. He has a habit of stopping by farmers markets in the summer, and said he planned to use The Farm as a steady supplement to his regular shopping at big-box stores.
He and others made it a busy week for The Farm, Founder and Executive Director Shelby Belote said.
“It was so much better than can be expected,” she said of the first few days.
Before opening The Farm, Belote spent a decade listening to the anxiety of local farmers as a donor and volunteer with Slow Food in the Tetons and on the board of the Jackson Hole Farmers Market.
The issue is three-pronged: There’s no reliable place to sell in the winter. Big, for-profit grocers demand too much product for small operations. Then, there’s the 30 to 40% margins most retailers take off the top.
The Teton area’s first year-round farmers market seeks to solve that. More than 50 vendors come from six counties in Wyoming and two in Idaho, with more in the pipeline. Providers set the price and the store takes an additional 10%.
Compared to other grocery stores, the new non-profit offers the lowest prices for local food and the highest margin for farmers, several farmers told KHOL. At The Farm, grass-fed, grain-finished beef from Little Jennie Ranch in Bondurant goes for $9.90 per pound. The same pound of ground beef at a nearby boutique, for-profit store was $14.99.
Rancher Greg Hertel of Ishawooa Mesa Ranch near Cody, Wyoming, said the margin he’d get back selling with The Farm versus another Jackson vendor would help him reinvest in virtual fences for his herd and keep up with diesel prices.
“[Business] just costs more; everything does. So that 20%, it’s huge,” he said.
That’s possible through philanthropy and grants, including from Teton Conservation District and federal ARPA money distributed through the Wyoming Department of Family Services.
Those funds helped Belote get off the ground and purchase cold storage to hold hundreds of pounds of meat. She rents the Miller House from the San Francisco-based Quinn Hill Foundation, which works to build sustainable food systems and support the resilience of small communities.
“The goal is to increase the production of local food in our communities so that we can create a sustainable local food system,” Belote said.
Though farmer Dale Sharkey loves going to market herself, the new model will allow her more time with her three teenagers. Sharkey has run Cosmic Apple Gardens in Victor, Idaho, for 30 years with her husband and is providing potatoes and carrots to The Farm in mid-November.
“We want a break; we want to hang out with our family on the weekends, you know, after we’ve gone so hard all summer,” she said.
Like Hertel in Cody, Sharkey sees that for-profit retail needs a larger markup to make it worth it. They both mostly sell direct-to-consumer.
“It’s no shade on anyone running a retail store. They deserve to make a living wage too,” she said. “But costs [are] getting really high for people.”
After a splashy opening, The Farm hopes to keep shoppers coming through the door for steady revenue for local farmers and to keep healthy food relatively affordable for consumers.
The Farm, open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., also offers a place to drop off domestic compost for about $5 a month. It sells other hard-to-find products in Jackson such as chicken necks, livers and feet.
