Farmers Post, a pilot program launched by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is enabling farmers from eastern Connecticut to ship their products to local households through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The initiative aims to tackle food waste and decrease supply-chain emissions while ensuring that small farmers are compensated for their hard work.
Farmers Post leverages the USPS’s Connect Local program, which allows small businesses to provide same-day and next-day delivery at a low cost. Julia Kurnik, Senior Director of Innovation Start-ups for the Markets Institute at WWF, tells Food Tank that “the USPS is an ideal partner because they are already going to everyone’s door. It allows us to reach everyone, regardless of geographic divides.”
Initiated by WWF in 2020, the program enables farmers to ship their products through existing postal routes, avoiding market markups and additional fees.
“Fruit and vegetable farmers in the United States actually only keep about seven to eight cents of every dollar that we spend on fresh produce in a grocery store,” Kurnik points out. “It’s a very long, complicated supply chain, so farmers only get to keep a very small percent of that revenue.”
This is where Farmers Post comes into play. “By providing a much more direct connection for farmers to sell to consumers, farmers get to keep almost all of the revenue,” Kurnik tells Food Tank. She adds that Farmers Post is especially beneficial for smaller farms or farms located in areas that are unlikely to have access to farmers’ markets that sell directly to consumers.
According to the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, approximately one third of the country’s available food supply at the retail and consumer levels goes uneaten. About 16 percent of this waste occurs on farms, WWF reports, often because of the cosmetic specifications from buyers. The direct sale model helps to tackle food loss and waste by rescuing produce that may not fit the marketing standards of grocery stores. According to an open case study by the University of British Columbia, 12 percent of fruit and vegetable loss comes from retail, with outdated cosmetic standards for fruits and vegetables. Local transport also prevents fresh produce from going bad as it travels.
WWF also hopes that Farmers Post will help to tackle food insecurity, an issue affecting approximately 34 million people in the U.S., according to Feeding America. “When we overlay maps of all the vegetable farms in the country with maps of food deserts– they heavily overlap. A lot of people are struggling to access food even in counties where it’s being grown,” says Kurnik. “We are hoping that Farmers Post can help address that access issue.”
Congressman Joe Courtney of Connecticut’s second district, a long-time champion of community-supported agriculture, has voiced support for the Program. The program has also caught the interest of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, who sent a representative to visit participating farms. “Farmers Post is exactly the kind of creative solution Canada’s food system needs,” the union states.
As Farmers Post scales, WWF hopes it will help make food systems more environmentally friendly, financially sustainable, while improving public health through fruit and vegetable consumption. Another pilot site will soon launch in the Virginia and Washington, D.C. area. “I’m personally very excited, because if we can nail down logistics with these pilots, the program could scale extremely quickly,” says Kurnik.
From there, Kurnik hopes that program will only continue to grow. “If successful, Farmers Post will move far beyond the World Wildlife Fund,” she tells Food Tank.
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Photo courtesy of Trinity Nguyen, Unsplash
