Most people assume buying groceries means choosing between convenience and conscience. Big-box retail is easy but disconnected. Farmers markets are authentic but impractical for stocking a pantry. Our Farms exists because that's a false choice.
Here's what actually happens when you buy grass-fed beef or heritage flour through a traditional grocery store: the supply chain is long, and every intermediary takes a cut. Distributors, brokers, warehouses, retail markups, it all adds up. By the time a product hits the shelf, the farmer who raised that steer or milled that wheat has seen only a fraction of what you paid.
Through Our Farms, that equation changes. By shipping direct from farm to consumer, we cut out intermediaries. Farmers earn more per sale than they would through conventional retail. That's the difference between surviving and actually making a living.
Why This Matters Beyond the Farm
When farmers earn more, rural economies stabilize. According to USDA data, 77% of farm household income now comes from off-farm sources. This is due to commodity prices and retail margins that have made it nearly impossible to live exclusively off farm income.
The median farm income in 2024 was negative $1,830. Think about that. Half of American farms lost money farming.
So farmers do what they have to do to keep land in production. And when farms go under, rural towns hollow out. Schools close. Main streets empty. The economic ripple doesn't stop at the property line.
Direct-to-consumer platforms like ours create a counterforce. When a regenerative cattle operation in Montana or a heritage grain mill in North Dakota earns enough to pay bills and reinvest, that income circulates locally. Farm equipment gets serviced. Feed suppliers stay in business. Rural jobs stick around.
The Real Cost of Cheap Food
Americans spend less on food as a percentage of income than any country in history. That efficiency came at a cost. Consolidation pushed small and mid-size farms out. Industrial agriculture optimized for yield and shelf stability, not flavor or soil health. The supply chain got longer, more complex, and more fragile.
Farm-direct models don't replace grocery stores. But they do offer an alternative for people who want to know where their beef came from, who milled their flour, or whether their potatoes were grown with synthetic fertilizers. That transparency redistributes value. Instead of margin disappearing into logistics, it stays with the people who did the actual work.
What Our Farms Actually Does
We're a marketplace that connects farmer-owned brands with customers across the country. Some products ship direct from farms. Others consolidate through our fulfillment center to reduce shipping costs and maintain cold chain integrity for frozen goods.
The model works because we don't compete with farmers. We enable them.
And customers get access to products that don't exist in conventional grocery stores. These aren't novelty items. They're what food looked like before efficiency became the only metric that mattered.
The Multiplier Effect
By ordering through Our Farms, you're funding a ranching operation that improves soil health, sequesters carbon, and maintains biodiversity. When that ranch thrives, it hires seasonal labor. It buys fencing and feed. It keeps a processing facility in business. Every dollar circulates multiple times through a local economy before it leaves.
Direct-to-consumer models shorten the supply chain. Farmers keep more. Rural economies stay intact.
What Comes Next
We're adding farm partners every month. Providing new products so you can get everything from pantry staples to frozen proteins without piecing together orders from multiple platforms. This is to prove that farm-direct can scale without sacrificing the values that make it work in the first place.
Local economies don't collapse overnight. They erode slowly, one closed business at a time. Rebuilding them works the same way, one farm sale at a time, one customer choosing transparency over convenience, one rancher earning enough to stay in business another year.
That's not revolutionary. But it's real. And it adds up.
