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I thought the same thing when I was trying to flesh this idea out a bit more, but the more I've spoken with farmers, the less I think this is the right way to g
by rlease 11y ago
I thought the same thing when I was trying to flesh this idea out a bit more, but the more I've spoken with farmers, the less I think this is the right way to go. The downside to doing this approach is that for many small farmers contract farming is all but assured. What if it doesn't rain when it needs to? What if you have an odd cold snap that wipes a crop? What if your planned delivery date of particular produce is delayed because things aren't growing as well as they should?
These are all things that happen with a fair amount of regularity on small farms, and things that many good restaurants would be flexible enough to accommodate, but it would sort of negate the benefits of planning out menus at the beginning of a season.
I would ideally love to see this idea extend to foragers as well. It would be kind of amazing to have local foragers post their pounds of morels and fiddlehead ferns and see local chefs snap them up.
- danieltillett 11y agoAll these problems are inherent to farming in general and farmers are used to dealing with them. Restaurants can plan around the lack of some produce at very short notice (they are used to doing this now), what chefs lack is a good way to pass the information of what they want grown. A little of this goes on right now when chefs talk directly to farmers about the sort of produce they want, but it is small scale and inefficient. No farmer can commit to growing a specialised crop without knowing the demand for it in advance. It is the sort of problem where the demand is present, but the communication is missing.