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View ProfilesPublished March 27, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
When April Royan moved her family from Florida to Vermont in 2019, she found herself making all sorts of lifestyle adjustments. She purchased snow gear for her two young children and quickly discovered what mud season was all about. She penciled in Town Meeting Day and started tapping her trees for maple syrup.
But Royan remained baffled — and amazed — by Vermont's abundance of self-serve farmstands, a phenomenon that many locals take for granted.
"I just couldn't believe it," Royan said. "I felt so honored that the people who owned the farms trusted me. My kids and I thought it was the coolest thing."
So when Royan and her husband started their own farm in Craftsbury Common — raising chickens, pigs and lambs — it felt only right that they have their own self-serve farmstand. The Royan Family Farm Stand has become a Craftsbury Common staple since opening in 2020, relying on the integrity of its neighbors to operate.
Last October, though, that trust was tested when a man stole $75 from the cash drawer and a $2 drink. While it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things, it shook Royan's sense of security.
"My kids check the farmstand on their way home from school," she said. "I worried for their safety."
Honor-system farmstands — as they're also called — rely on an embedded sense of community trust to operate. They vary in size, flashiness and type of goods sold. Some are mere shacks, while others are properly insulated marketplaces. What they have in common is a lack of on-site operator to watch and guide shoppers and process transactions.
While self-serve farmstands aren't unique to the state, the low population of rural Vermont makes them a particularly cost-effective option. They proliferated during the pandemic, and despite anecdotal reports of increased theft, that growth shows no sign of slowing. For many Vermonters, these farmstands are a source of pride, exemplifying the trust and scrappiness that make rural life worthwhile.
"The self-serve farmstand has been a staple for small Vermont farms selling to their communities for a long time," said Lisa Chase, director of the Vermont Tourism Research Center at the University of Vermont Extension. "Rural communities have that level of trust that makes it work."
Farmstands were once the only way to buy locally grown vegetables and fruits directly from the farmer. As industrialization changed the way people shopped for groceries, many self-serve stands across the United States — including in Vermont — shuttered.
But for many owners of smaller, more rural farms, paying an employee to run a farmstand at the end of a lonely dirt road is a net loss. "These are small operations," Chase said. "It does not make sense to pay someone or to spend your own time waiting for people to come."
When COVID-19 hit, self-serve farmstands became even more popular, providing a way for neighbors to purchase groceries without risking a trip to a crowded store. The number of such stands in the state ballooned during the pandemic, according to Chase, who estimates there are now anywhere from 200 to 500 farmstands in Vermont.
Jesse Kayan, co-owner of Wild Carrot Farm in Brattleboro, opened a self-serve farmstand abutting his vegetable farm during the pandemic. Kayan and his wife stacked their spacious stand with all sorts of groceries: vegetables, fish, cookies, and even gelato and coffee — all from local producers, and all available to buy without needing to approach another human.
"We sort of filled this niche of extreme COVID precaution for quite a while," he explained. "Our farmstand sales grew tenfold in the matter of a couple of months."
While Kayan said he saw a slight drop in sales once the pandemic ended, the trend of shopping hyperlocally for groceries seems to have caught on, and it gave self-serve farmstands a boost.
"Since COVID, people just want really easy access to food and to avoid going into really crowded stores," said Janis Reinke, owner of Frog Hollow Farmstead in Castleton, which has a self-serve farmstand.
The pandemic also led many farms to stock their stands with a wider variety of goods, often from other local producers. A farmstand could become a one-stop shop for neighbors to get just about anything they needed.
But the shift to a marketplace model has made some farms more susceptible to theft. Farm Craft VT, an herb farm in Shelburne that sells soaps, toothpaste and other handmade goods, had more than 190 items, valued at $1,200, stolen from its self-serve farmstand late last year. Co-owner Becca Lindenmeyr said almost none of the stolen items bore the farm's branded name, which makes her suspect that someone is reselling the goods online.
Lindenmeyr has heard from other farmers in Chittenden County about similar instances of theft, but none at the scale that she experienced. She thinks Burlington's homelessness and drug crises are contributing to retail theft, which is spilling into neighboring communities. "We live on the edge of the Burlington bubble, and that bubble is expanding," she said.
Yet Lindenmeyr has no plans to shut down her self-serve farmstand. "The theft itself was far eclipsed by the positive response from the community," she said. Following the incident, which was caught on video, Lindenmeyr raised $3,000 from a benefit sale at her farmstand. She split the proceeds among Howard Center, Champlain Housing Trust and the Vermont Foodbank.
Her goal? Redirect energy toward what she views as the root causes of the theft and reaffirm the strength of the farmstand. "We hope that all it will do is continue to connect the community," she said.
Theft has caused at least one farmer to close her self-serve farmstand, however. Cheryl DeVos, owner of Kimball Brook Farm in Ferrisburgh, shut down her farmstand earlier this year after three instances of theft: Dozens of pounds of prime-cut animal meat disappeared from her freezers.
DeVos, who also works as a farm inspector, said she hasn't heard about many other farms experiencing this kind of trouble.
Still, some farmers are taking precautions. Jane MacLean, owner of Sweet Roots Farm & Market in Charlotte, said she has installed cameras and removed more expensive items from her farmstand. During the summer, she has employees check customers out, but the stand becomes self-serve during the offseason.
Some farmers opt to accept only credit cards and mobile payments through Venmo, rather than cash, which is easy to steal. But MacLean and others worry that electronic systems deter older customers.
Most owners of Vermont's self-serve farmstands seem committed to keeping them operating. "The amount of food and cash that we've lost to theft doesn't compare to what it would cost to have somebody staff the store," Kayan said.
Royan, the farmer who moved from Florida, said her Craftsbury neighbors' reaction to the theft at her self-serve farmstand has only made her more invested in the model. After posting on Facebook about the incident, she was amazed at the response.
"People were so mad that someone in our community had stolen," she said. The day after the theft, the farmstand had its biggest sales day of the entire year. Royan ran out of pads of paper for customers to write notes of support. Her phone was flooded with texts from community members letting her know how much they appreciated her farmstand.
And a few days later, something serendipitous happened: Royan received a call from a Pennsylvania woman who had seen a picture of the thief on the news. According to Royan, the woman recognized him as her long-lost son, whom she hadn't heard from in more than three years. The woman was able to track down her son and reunite with him as a result of the post, Royan said.
Shortly afterward, Royan received a handwritten apology from the farmstand thief and $77 in cash in the mail. The gesture made her cry.
"I took it as a sign," Royan said. "I wasn't going to change our model."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Trust Test | Self-serve farmstands hold tight to their honor-system payment model"
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