What we keep finding
A group that has been trained thoroughly. Often by an organisation that has been doing this competently for decades. They know how to grow it, process it, keep it clean and hit a standard. The certificates are on the wall and the skills are real.
And no buyer. Not a difficult buyer or a badly priced buyer. None. The programme ended at the point where the group became capable of producing something, on the assumption that capability finds a market on its own.
The gap
Selling is a different skill set entirely, and nobody funded it. What a unit costs to produce. What it has to sell for after a retailer takes their cut. What a label legally has to carry. What a buyer asks for before a second order, which is almost never what they asked for before the first.
None of that is production knowledge. All of it decides whether production knowledge turns into income, and it is consistently the part left out — because it is harder to demonstrate in a report than a training completion number is.
Rural producer groups are trained to grow. Rarely to sell.
Two doors, deliberately
So we run two. Groups that can carry their own compliance — consistent quality, standing paperwork, somebody who can answer a buyer's call — get their own brand, and we do the naming, packaging, label compliance, pricing and the first orders.
Groups that cannot carry that yet sell quality-verified produce under myefarm. That is not a lesser outcome, it is the honest one. A brand handed to a group that cannot sustain it fails publicly and takes the group's confidence with it.
What we changed about ourselves
We stopped treating handover as completion. Market linkage takes longer to hold than any project timeline allows for, which means staying past the point where the funding cycle closes and the report has been filed.
The number we actually watch is not how many brands were launched. It is how many are still trading without us.
