For two decades I’ve been writing about the transition that New Hampshire agriculture has gone through, from a few large farms growing a single crop (apples, for example) that is sold en masse to wholsalers, to many small farms that grow a bunch of stuff (veggies, meat, flowers) and sell it directly to consumers. I have a story in the Monitor showing that while the transition is easy to say, it’s hard to make it work.
The Pasture2Plate farm store in Loudon is for sale, demonstrating once again that it can be tricky business connecting local farms with local customers.
“It is for sale for a number of factors, and they all basically boil down to time. We had to significantly cut back on the farm to staff the store,” said Noah Dumont, the agent handling the sale.
This is a common story in the local-food scene in New Hampshire and elsewhere. Farming has always been an all-consuming job but extra requirements have been added , making the old system of wholesale farming, where a few products were grown and sold to a few stores or warehouses, more rare. Now it’s mostly a direct-to-consumer model, meaning small farmers must grow and produce a wider variety of products and also spend time on things like individual pricing, customer relations and marketing.
One goal among advocates is to create local-food-focused stores or food hubs that can take some of this burden off farmers’ shoulders. That was part of the goal of Pasture2Plate, as the name implies.
“It was looking to help solve that problem, and for a lot of farms it definitely helped,” Dupont said. He gave the example of a chicken farm. “Suddenly they had too many eggs, so we started buying many dozens of eggs, and it helped them grow their business.”
Dumont is the son of Patrick and April Dumont, owners of Dumont Farms, which moved to Loudon in 2019 as part of an expansion into meat production that at one point saw them raising 2,000 chickens as well as pigs and beef cattle. Like many small farms, they used farmers markets because selling themselves allowed them keep more of the profit, but the time involved in loading and unloading, setting up and dismantling, driving all over the place and actually staffing the markets proved more of a burden than expected.
“I think farmers markets are great for meeting people, getting a foot in the door, but in the end, it’s a time commitment that takes you away from actual production. We were doing 13 farmers markets, basically every week . … We didn’t have much time to actually work on the farm,” he said. “So we thought there was an opening to have our own store.”
In May 2024, they opened Pasture2Plate in a leased building on Rt. 129 Loudon, not far from the farm. It operated like a six-day-a-week farm stand, selling their own meat as well as items from other farms and crafters: produce, dairy, baked goods, meats and local merchandise like body care products and decorative items.
But they found that the time saved by not having to travel to farmers markets was taken up with the details of coordinating deliveries and orders from scores of suppliers, plus staffing the store from noon to 6 most days (10 a.m. to 6 on weekends). Changes in the family’s other jobs and the arrival of a newborn has made the life/work balance too hard to maintain, Dumont said, leading to the reluctant decision to sell the business.
There’s also the issue of charging a sustainable price. It almost always costs more to raise a given amount of food on a small nearby farm than a big factory farm, even when transport is taken into account, because of economies of scale and other differences.
“People are going to have to swallow the sticker price” if they want local food to exist, Dumont said. “We want to pay the price to ensure the farmer, the producer, the fisherman can continue for another day.”
The asking price is $120,000, including inventory and a “turnkey operation” with 20 months remaining on the lease.
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