Farmer Spotlight: The Neighborhood Farm
How one market Farm went from reeling to relief with online ordering.
Kate Canney and her wife own and operate The Neighborhood Farm outside Boston, MA. Their Farm has grown organic produce for the past 13 years, selling to restaurants and at farmers markets in Boston. Their status quo, like many, shifted due to the coronavirus pandemic. Kate explained how The Neighborhood Farm came to be, and how they acted quickly to adapt to new challenges.
Kate proudly announced as a kid that she’d grow up to become an organic vegetable Farmer, inspired by her mother (a professional ornamental gardener) and their own childhood vegetable garden. In 2008 I dug up a quarter acre in a few of my neighbor's backyards to grow heirloom tomatoes. Suddenly, I had a LOT of heirloom tomatoes. I signed up for a brand new farmers market so I had a place to sell them.
More and more people offered us land in different sizes and locations across Eastern Massachusetts. We borrowed greenhouse space from friends and cobbled together more makeshift greenhouses and yards over the course of 10 years. In 2017 we began looking for a long-term Farm home, and met the family who owns the property we’re renting right now. We moved everything to one location.” Kate added, with relief, “It’s so much easier!”
When asked what she enjoys most about farming, Kate responded, chuckling: “Honestly, for me farming is like an art project. Every year I get to build this installation anew—make a plan, watch everything grow and come to being on its own. It’s different every year, never boring. It’s the biggest puzzle I’ve ever had.
Challenges have been a lack of long-term land tenure, and no water or insufficient water. One year everything just died of drought, another year diseases wiped out everything. One time, all the second-hand equipment we’d bought died simultaneously. I looked at my team and said, ‘Well, here’s a shovel.’
Our Farm is 20 minutes outside Boston. We go to two markets in the city and one in the suburbs, and have an on-Farm stand. We never had ‘shares’ or ‘boxes’ for our CSA, it was always a pre-paid, free choice model. CSA Members paid for credit ahead of time and showed up to grab what they needed at markets or the Farm Stand. About 50% of our produce was distributed through the CSA and the rest was sold to shoppers at the farmers markets or Farm Stand.
That all ended exactly 2 weeks and 10 minutes ago, when I got the phone call that the markets were closing (at least temporarily). We also elected to voluntarily close our Farm Stand in an effort to help stop the spread of Coronavirus. We were left with a lot of boxes of harvested vegetables and no real plan.
We whipped up a form and sent it to people, saying ‘Order what you want and we’ll figure out how to get it to you.’ That was the first week of the virus shutdown. It was hard because we didn’t have any inventory control. Orders came in, and the form wouldn’t aggregate the orders or draw down from a live inventory, and it wasn’t easy to track payments. I was frantically making lines on a spreadsheet, tied to my phone and yelling back and forth, ‘do we really have 7 bags of carrots!?’
It was so difficult for us to keep up with orders coming in that we’d have to close the form off and on, for a significant amount of time. We’d take it down, and then put it back up after an hour. Basically, we were only capturing orders from whoever happened to be looking at Instagram at that moment. They were the winners who happened to get a chance to order. People were understanding, but it was definitely not a long-term option or solution.
In the midst of that chaos, I got a call from Lauren [Barn2Door employee] out of the blue. I answered it—which I usually don’t—but it’s lucky I did, because once she introduced herself and Barn2Door I said, ‘I’d really like to talk to you!’ It was like destiny; we signed up and got our store up and going. Our first big opening was yesterday, when we sent the store link to our 150 CSA Members, and will open it up to the public this coming week.
We had a great response, and it seemed seamless to our customers. Overall, it just worked. I emailed our customer list and posted on social media (both our Facebook and Instagram), and I’ll keep doing so regularly to keep everyone in the loop and reminded to purchase. This has been a godsend.
We’re doing contactless self-serve pickup for now, so customers order and then come find the box with their name. Next week we’ll add direct delivery, since many of our customers in Boston don’t have cars. Luckily, we now have a great system for taking payments, orders and managing any kind of pickup or delivery option. It is easy to filter, we print our pick and pack list and can add door-to-door delivery addresses into a simple routing app.
Packing is so much easier now that we can print out their orders and make sure everything’s accurate, especially because we’re social distancing while working on the Farm. We’re all 10 feet away from each other at all times, so there’s no assembly line for boxes. One person has to own packing, so Barn2Door has been a really helpful tool to stay organized.
I’m really excited that you guys [Barn2Door] are building our website, especially since we’re seeing such a response to online sales. I know it’s important to have that digital presence and have it be really beautiful—and the virus is creating a huge opportunity for local farmers to be online and capture sales. Having an updated website has been on my to-do list forever, and I’m so happy to hand that off to Barn2Door.
Honestly, I can’t tell you enough how helpful everyone had been. Our Onboarding Manager, Kevin, was up late that first night helping us set up inventory. Everyone’s gone above and beyond and just did what it took to get us set up and selling. You all stepped up and blew the timeline in my head out of the water. It happened so fast, and I want to give some serious, serious props to the team that helped me.
The Barn2Door Team is humbled to work around the clock for Farmers like Kate, who are looking to shift their business online and stay organized. We’ve compiled free resources and Farm success stories amidst the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re curious to learn about Barn2Door for your own Farm, you can learn how it works in this 5 minute video.