Customer Story

Merritt, his wife, Gretchen, and their family have been selling at farmers markets for 17 years. They also operate a small storefront on busy Highway 395 adjacent to their farm near Colville. At each farmers market, Front Porch Farm will sell between 2,000 and 4,000 pounds of fresh produce. Four markets a week. 100 markets a year. Come rain, shine, smoke or pandemic, customers rely on Front Porch Farm and 2020 was no exception.

Front Porch Farm is a family business where each person’s unique skills contribute to the whole. Merritt’s dad, a former contractor, handles construction projects on the farm and manages the garden with Merritt’s mom who starts all the plants. Merritt takes care of the cattle, hay and irrigation, along with the farm social media accounts, helping Gretchen with farm bookkeeping and other marketing. Merritt’s sister, Megan, and her husband, Tom, are the faces of the storefront and spend many hours in the garden. Merritt says it took everyone pulling together this season to manage the changes they faced.

“We wanted to use this crazy time to try some new things,” says Merritt. “Instead of freaking out about the changes, we wanted to test some good ideas that we may continue to implement. This year we used a new check-list system at market, so the person handling money doesn’t handle the food. It worked surprisingly well and will be something we continue.

It’s just like having handwashing stations at farmers markets now. It’s a common-sense improvement we will continue down the road.” At the beginning of the season, Merritt, Gretchen and family chose to reduce their farm store hours – down to two days a week – using the extra time to expand the garden. Gretchen took the opportunity to implement a new online ordering system with curbside pickup for people who didn’t want to come into the store or shop at a farmers market.

“We’d thought about dabbling in online orders and this was a great chance to try it,” says Gretchen. “If it didn’t work, we could always say it was for the pandemic and go back to the way we were doing things before. But we’ve seen a lot of growth and we’ll probably continue online sales through the winter. With reduced hours our store sales were down, but thanks to extra time spent in the garden, our market sales were up around 25%. We’ll take that as a win."

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