This is a clip of an interview of Kaelin Vernon of “Peacefield Farms” with Sam Ford, Grant McCracken and Josh Poling acting as interviewers. The interview was conducted in the second week of March some miles outside of Bowling Green, Kentucky.
We spent several days traveling around the hills of Western Kentucky. The objective was to glimpse various parts of the local artisanal economy. We met Kaelin thanks to his connection to Josh Poling.
There were several questions in play in the interview.
Sam in particular was looking at what he calls the “balance between the logics of the commodity and gift economies. If your customers are buying from you because of the story of your farm, who you are, and how you do things, then it’s decidedly not a transactional relationship. You’re selling to your neighbors. They’re buying from their neighbor.”
You are building on, and building out, a social relationship, but, as Sam puts it, “When you have to translate that relationship back into something transactional, it can be tough to do. You don’t want to overcharge friends. You don’t want things to get awkward with neighbors. And that leads many artisanal businesses to pricing themselves in ways that they barely make a profit.”
Second question: We also saw a version of the topic that showed so strongly in the Olives and Grace interview (posted last Friday). Without a consumer who grasps the artisanal proposition, your pricing is always going to look too high. As Sam puts it, “Pricing depends on people understanding/getting the premium for what you do.”
Sam adds a problem (# 3 in this list, for those using a scorecard) that must haunt every artisanal player: that consumer enthusiasm does not represent a full and lasting conversion, but may prove to be something that’s merely “passing through.” In Sam’s words, “Fad buyers may be attracted to “buying local” but only for the surface of it.”
As a student of American culture, this particularly concerns me. I have seen several deep seated ideas change often and dramatically. American culture has some ideas it treats as ballast. We can’t know at this point whether these will include the artisanal concept. It was be wrong (worse, it would be glib) to assume that they will. And this means we may have a relatively brief window to get the word out, to encourage people to “sign on” to the Artisanal economy in a substantial way. When the fashion changes and some part of it will, many of people who are now loyal Farmer Market’s patrons, will move on.
A fourth question is the “false claim” problem. Sam says, “Consider the story Kaelin tells of big restaurants that buy only a small bit of their product, so that they could list that they “buy local” but so that they could primarily serve product shipped from elsewhere. Consider the story we heard from the guy who runs the dairy farm about the employee at the chain grocery who said, “It’s local from somewhere.””
There is tons of fakery here. And several people we talked to in Kentucky feel this problem intensely. There are no easy answers. Part there are some promising solution. At some point, in these proceedings we will tell the story of farmer’s markets in Bowling Green as a useful case in point.
A fifth question: this interview clip is interesting because it shows one way of solving all of these questions. Kaelin is talking about a conversion. The guy he is working with suddenly grasps what Peacefield farms is about and this comes largely from the “power of the gift” (as we call it in anthropology). It’s when Kaelin gives him a pound of sausage and dozen eggs that the guy makes a reciprocal gesture of his own, and a transaction cash economy falls away. Suddenly, we see gifts in conversation, as it were, and a different relationship, one that helps the relative stranger grasp the point of the artisanal economy and draws him into its sphere.
A sixth issue. Sometimes these private reciprocities come to define the identity of the trading partners. Thus “Peacefield Farms” appears on the wall of Home Cafe, a restaurant in Bowling Green, Kentucky (and, as it happens, a restaurant owned by one of the investigators on the project, Josh Poling). This helps Home Cafe make good on their artisanal proposition, even as it drums up new business for Peacefield Farms.
Sam is right to say that the mutuality of the relationship in the Artisanal Economy can serve to constrain the amount of value the producer can extract. But in this case it also helps them cooperate in the creation of a visibility in the larger community, and this, we can hope, helps everyone, gradually, come to understand the proposition and the need to pay for it. As in, “Oh, I’m supporting a farm!”
Tons more data and more thinking are called for here.
Seventh question. This “marketing” or “profile” piece is a big issue for every individual player and the community as a whole. As Sam puts it, “If you don’t have deep knowledge of talent in marketing/PR/etc., how do you make progress?” One of my Uber drivers on this trip dropped out of his artisanal project precisely because he just couldn’t solve this part of the problem. I don’t mean that he failed to do marketing successfully. I mean, the marketing problem so vexed him, it proved to be his “final straw,” and he dropped out.
Eighth question. And if all of this were not enough to daunt the artisanal player, there is the issue of regulation. As Sam puts it,
“How do you navigate the labyrinth of regulation and services? Kaelin’s story echoed something we heard from throughout. An artisanal business may be run by someone who has great talents/resources at their disposal but not necessarily history with managing all the local governmental and community entities you have to navigate. We heard stories throughout the trip of people confronted with how to get support from “the system” without having much sway to bring to the table, being blindsided by regulations they knew nothing about, etc. (Remember the beer brewer constantly hit with regulations he didn’t know existed, or the dairy farmer trying to deal with the USDA guy from out of state versus the state regulators who get it and are just doing their job.)”
Ok, that will do for now. Enjoy the interview. More to come!
Thank you, Sam, for producing comments at such speed. Apologies for my ham handedness in using them here.