This piece about a Vermont local food network has some great nuggets of utilitarian wisdom on market access. Growers act as their own purveyors, soliciting and receiving orders via email and text on the morning the food is plucked. Everyone has a phone. Why not use it to call the producer in the field and have your stuff picked to order? You can run an efficient, informal network of buyers and sellers with no more than a phone-tree and a distro list.
Local food should be about building profitable business relationships across shorter social distances. Having the phone numbers of a few dozen local chefs in your pocket with money to spend spans the social distance to zero. Geographic distance loses all relevance to me when the grower gets the buy-order directly from the chef via text message while out in the field. Good stuff, VT.
