An Interview with Kate Donald of Stout Oak Farm

We recently spoke to Kate Donald—A Local Food Marketplace customer who has used the platform to sell online as both a farmer and a food hub.  Read on for more about Kate’s farm, the larger farm collective she cofounded, the impact of COVID-19 on online sales, and more.

Stout Oak Farm

• • Organic vegetable farm in Brentwood, New Hampshire
  • Founded: 2012
  • Owned by Kate Donald
  • Sells veggies, seedlings, CSA shares, and a Farm Store Credit Share

Stout Oak Farm is a 5-acre Certified Organic vegetable farm in Brentwood, New Hampshire. They grow a wide range of annual vegetables, all kinds of greens, and many microgreens. One of the farm’s goals is to focus on sustainable growth through careful soil stewardship, and the farm recently became certified by the Real Organic Project—a movement focused on soil as the center of a healthy farm ecosystem.

Three River Farmers Alliance

• • A farmer-owner food hub in the Seacoast, New Hampshire Region
  • Founded: 2014
  • Owners: Kate Donald (Stout Oak Farm), Greg Balog (Heron Pond Farm), Andre Cantelmo (Heron Pond Farm), and Josh Jennings (Meadow’s Mirth Farm)
  • Connects 50+ farms and food producers to local homes, restaurants, and businesses

Kate Donald is also a founder and co-owner of the Three River Farmers Alliance. “When we founded in 2014, our goal was to make it easier for farmers to get their local food into the hands of more people, and to streamline the process. By sharing trucks and cold storage for example, we reduce the costs and resources needed to distribute our local food. “

Both Sides: Farmer and Farmer’s Alliance

Between Stout Oak and Three River, Kate reaches her customers in different ways in different times of the year. Using one platform for all of her local food sales helps Kate stay streamlined:

“Using the same software for both Stout Oak Farm and Three River was incredible. And with Connect, I’m excited about having even more integration between the two.”

Local Food Connect is our latest project to help increase opportunities for farmers through technology. The free app helps farmers manage inventory, products, and sales to multiple markets from a single login. Read more about Connect here.

As of 2022, Three River works with over 50 farmers. Using LFM has made this process manageable according to Kate:

“What helps is that LFM is organized in a way that as producers, we list inventory ourselves, set prices, and describe our own products. We maintain the transparency of sourcing—you can see where every product comes from and customers value that.

The amazing thing is that once producers learn to use LFM, they really take care of all the work of making the storefront populated with all that awesome stuff. The staff at Three River helps them make the most of the site, but all the content is from the farmers themselves. That really comes through to the customer.

LFM’s pick list feature is also extremely valuable. It helps us train farm crews. And once they can read that report they have everything they need to go about their day.

This all feeds back to what you’re doing with the Connect app, making it easy for farmers to list their own content for food hubs. ”

Administrative Challenges and Technology

Not every online sales platform is built the same, and Kate tried out six different online tools for Stout Oak Farm before switching to LFM in 2020.

One challenge before finding LFM was how to manage over 100 farm share members. According to Kate, “We were really excited to find that LFM’s subscription module worked really well for our CSA. A big draw of LFM is that it lets customers manage their experience of ordering CSAs for themselves, rather than waiting for us to prompt them through each steps with manual emails. It’s also so easy to accept credit cards on LFM, and we really like that we can customize payment schedules. The batch payment process is great!”

LFM also gave Kate the opportunity to implement a more unique type of share: a Farm Store Credit Share that allows members to purchase credits that they can later spend in the Stout Oak farm store on veggies, seedlings, or other local food products.

“It’s our most administratively challenging share, and using LFM has been the best system we’ve had! Customers can see for themselves when the credit is getting low, and that encourages them to log in and add money to their account. The system lets customers be proactive, we don’t have to hand-hold. Money keeps coming into the farm, and they keep getting local food! Before, we kept track on pencil and paper. It was simple but we had to do a lot of math! Now it’s all online, customers can manage it themselves, and LFM keeps track of everything.”

Sudden Growth and Quick Pivots in 2020

When businesses started shutting down at the start of the Covid pandemic, the owners of Three River Farmers Alliance decided to quickly pivot to home delivery. The contactless delivery service, Veggie-GO, was so successful that it now serves over 500 householders per week. Kate credits LFM’s powerful software with the ability to make changes so quickly:

“In 2020, we were so grateful that the LFM software could do so much more than what we were doing with it. We felt really lucky that we chose a platform that was more robust than what we needed at first, so it could accommodate that rapid change and rapid scaling up.”

The LFM system also helped smooth the process for Stout Oak Farm: “For my farm in particular, with the extra stress of 2020, we were scrambling to pack orders almost every day, and having systems that were easy for the whole team to use was really important.”

Focus on Local

One of Kate’s biggest priorities is helping customers know where their food comes from, even when they’re ordering online.

“Local Food Marketplace maintains the integrity you get from buying in person. It’s a transparent site, and customers can trust that when they go to our storefront, they are going directly to farmers. We hear all the time what a big priority this is for shoppers. With all the different types of food distribution out there, sourcing gets muddy. But when they visit our site they can trust where their food comes from.”

Not a Faceless Tech Company

One of the key reasons Kate prefers LFM to the six other platforms she has tried, is the personal experience with LFM.

“When I think of my experience with other software built for farmers, what I really appreciate about LFM is the communication. We’ve had such a positive experience thanks to the people. We’ve had a partner with Amy and the team, not just a contract with a software company.

When we get in touch to say “hey, we’d love to see this feature,” the answer is never “our software doesn’t do that.” The answer is always “we’ve heard that from other farmers and it’s coming in the next release,” or “that’s a great idea we’ll look into that,” or “here’s a work around that you can use.” That’s a really different experience than other less personal companies.”