Honor Stands
Thoughts on Honesty and Need
by Gowan Batist
I was first introduced to Honor Stands in France, on a narrow lane across from a heavy clay field in which a draft horse was patiently pulling a drag harrow. To an American, even a small-town West Coast kid like me, it was radical to see a drawer of change laid out on a table, containing quite a few Euros, and the farm’s offerings totally open to the passerby. I loved shopping at them and wanted to have one of our own at Fortunate Farm when I came home. In the early days, we only opened the stand on weekends, and we staffed the tables laid out in our barn. This was mostly because we didn’t have a system set up for self-checkout yet, and because my folks loved the chance to see our customers, which they didn’t get to do during the week like I did.
When Covid hit, we converted the farm stand to fully self-serve, established a hand-washing sink and extra safety procedures, and bought gallons of produce-safe surface sanitizer to spray down all the counters and surfaces every evening. We heard from many customers that the stand was an essential part of their food security—as the stand was open air it felt safe, and it couldn’t be disrupted by global shortages as easily.
Throughout the pandemic, new farm stands have popped up like mushrooms. I’ve heard of several new ones just this week, and I hope that, like me, the other farmers around the community find that they are a valuable addition to their business and useful for their customers.
The individual farm stand is much like a farmer’s market booth, except that it may be unstaffed. These stands give you a window into that particular farm’s ethos, aesthetic, and growing practices. A collective farm stand, like the one we run with our neighbors at Fortunate Farm, and the one recently opened at Ridgewood Ranch, combines the offerings of multiple farmers and pastoralists into a single stand. This greatly reduces the labor of each individual farmer or rancher and forms a dynamic and interesting whole out of the smaller selection of products each of them does best, and creates a more convenient experience for the shopper.
If a farm stand is something you’re considering adding to your farm, make sure you know the relevant rules regarding your zoning and business permits, which will vary based on where you live (unincorporated county vs city limits) and your type of business. One of the necessary expenses we incurred was installing a wheelchair accessible porta-potty and hand washing station near the stand.
The single most common question I am asked about our farm stand is about theft, and what, if any, security measures we have in place. I’m mostly asked this by customers, but by farmers as well. That question is one of many in agriculture that seems like a small thread, but when you pull on it, it unravels the entire tapestry of how the person asked sees the world and their role in it.
Last summer I was sitting in the shade of our olive trees with a friend, catching up about life from ten feet away. (You can do things like sit under a tree while vending is happening when you have a self-serve farm stand.) I was raw from multiple deaths in our family in short succession, and the many ways the pandemic was punishing our business. We were sharing our stories of loss and survival when someone popped out of the farm stand, walked over, and asked if I worked here. I said I did. She said that she forgot her wallet but wrote down what she took and would Venmo or PayPal us from town. I said that was fine, thanked her for coming by, and went back to my chat. My friend asked if I worried that I had just been scammed.
When we first opened an honor farm stand, I joined a few online groups of farmers discussing them, and this question came up over and over again there, too.
In fall of 2013, our Federal Ag loan was stalled in the middle of our escrow process, threatening to wreck the sale. It cost us over $100,000 for a commercial bridge loan to save the farm before we even got there. The reason? Some Republicans had refused to approve the Federal budget, which included the USDA loan program we were participating in, as a stunt over Planned Parenthood. That was a political scam.
Last year, someone fraudulently applied for a Federal Covid relief loan in our business name, for $65,000. This happened at a time when Covid was absolutely taking a wrecking ball to my family. It was in the immediate aftermath of the loss of my dad, the loss of my crew member's mom a few weeks following him, while my partner's dad was in the ICU, and while my aunt's family had just lost loved ones. We had to scramble to respond, do a FOIA request, explain to the IRS that they would not be getting $65,000 from us, etc. Seeing the paper trail of the person in Stockton who put us through this stress at that vulnerable time is probably the closest I have come to actually seeing red. That was a financial scam.
The very expensive medical supplies that auto-shipped to my folks’ house had to be canceled after my dad’s death. To order more or change your prescription, there's an automated system. To cancel, you have to speak to a person. So my grieving mom sat on hold for six hours waiting to talk to someone, being automatically hung up on after every hour. If you've experienced the loss of a spouse, you know it's not a time when your phone line is generally free for hours. Every day that she tried and failed, a credit card was getting charged for expensive supplies for a person who no longer needed them. That was a corporate scam.
People needing food are not in any of these categories, even in the regrettable circumstances that they do lie or cause harm to our business. Human beings feeding their bodies can never be the same as the above instances, because the human body, unlike capitalism, has limits and will stop when its needs are met. That said, I would prefer people to be honest and simply ask for food. It makes our accounting easier, and we could then share local resource information with them.
When we opened our farm, our entire start-up fund for the season had been drained by the aforementioned emergency loan. An anonymous person left $2,000 in cash on the seat of my unlocked truck, with a note saying it was from some older homesteading women who wanted our farm to succeed. In their honor, we have given a free farm subscription CSA to a family every year since. We are regular donors to all kinds of food aid in the county. Giving food away is something that we owe the community for the privilege of being held up by them when we are in need, like we have been lately. When my mom was hospitalized this spring, we were snowed under by casseroles. Nothing we have ever given or had taken has come close to what we’ve received.
People probably steal from our farm stand sometimes, as they do from all stores. We've never had a massive theft like someone running off with the (admittedly pretty heavy) beautiful cash box my uncle made, and we also have to consider the cost savings of not paying staff time for someone to sit at the stand. Overall, people are generous, and I know some folks overpay. There is also an amazing local man who gives us several hundred dollars annually to offset some of the costs of our food donations. He is the perfect example of using your privilege, and your extra cushion of dollars, to go straight to direct private relief for people, and we are grateful.
To be honest, outright theft bothers me a lot less than people who I see come into the stand, grab a few things without adding the price up, throw a bill in the till and leave. I do want people who can afford it to honestly pay for the cost of our labor and overhead, and when and if they can, pay it forward too. I notice the discrepancy between people asking about theft vs people asking about casual lack of correct checkout, when I think the latter actually amounts to a higher loss. This is reflected all throughout our society—there is hyper-criticism of poor individuals, and little focus on the negligence of more affluent people. We live in an exploitative system from the stolen land we grow food on to the way our taxes are spent and our loved ones extorted by for-profit medical care. I would like to see us be more suspicious of corporate subsidy scams that steal our tax dollars than we are of our neighbors. Don’t let other struggling human beings be the stand-in for the systemic challenges we are all under pressure from.
As a farm community, we are abundant and generous. On the coast, The Botanical Gardens farm donates thousands of pounds of produce to the Food Bank every year. Meals on Wheels utilizes fresh local produce from the Senior Center garden and donations from farmers. Caring Kitchen delivers healthy local meals to cancer patients, and Action Network provides direct food aid to families. I know there are many more inland I’m less aware of. As a community, we bring our donations together to fund programs like the Good Farm Fund, which do the most practical thing possible–directly grant funds that small farms need to be more resilient to food security for our community.
Farm stands are part of the food landscape of our county now, possibly more than they ever have been. It can feel like a radical change to step out from behind the table as a farmer and head back out to the field while customers come and go. I encourage you to try it, both as a farmer and a customer. What if we lived like we all radically trusted each other? What more would we become capable of, if we lived that experiment long enough to make it true?
Gowan Batist is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs. Her writing can be found at https://www.patreon.com/GowanBatist