The Financial Performance Implications of Differential Marketing Strategies: Exploring Farms that Pursue Local Markets as a Core Competitive Advantage

This study explores how participation in direct and intermediated marketing channels and key operational factors influence agricultural producers' financial performance. Accordingly, we divide the sample of local and regional food marketers into quartiles segmented by profitability performance as an initial exploration of how strong and weak performance may vary across scale, location, and choice of direct and intermediated channels. Moreover, other financial metrics that vary across types of producers and performance-based quartiles are analyzed. This paper provides initial evidence that participation in direct and intermediated markets may allow farms of any scale of sales volume to be financially viable.