by TM Petaccia

Small City Farm built a new barn with proceeds from a multi-chef farm dinner hosted over the summer. TM Petaccia/UP

Outside of a CSA limited to approximately 20 customers, and select items available via Freshlist, Small City Farm has operated primarily as a farm-to-restaurant operation. Last Saturday, however, owners Kim Shaw and Rohan Gibbs did a test run of their new farm stand, just off Brookshire Blvd. ten minutes north of Uptown.

“It was time to get the ball rolling,” Shaw says. “We just finished our last CSA for the year, and figured it was time to test it out.”

The impetus of creating a farm stand was spurred when the farm’s largest customer, chef Paul Verica, first closed his restaurant Orto in Noda last December, followed by The Stanley in Elizabeth in May. “We needed to make up that revenue,” Shaw says.

The farm stand is housed in an existing barn just off the farm’s entrance. Earlier this year Rohan and Gibbs hosted a special Edwardian farm lunch event to raise funds for a new barn which allowed them to use the existing structure as the farm stand. The new barn also required a $20,000 loan from the UDSA. “I never went through a process like that in my life,” Shaw says of the loan process. “The documentation for a USDA loan of this type requires more paperwork than a mortgage loan. Nothing prepared us for everything we had to go through to get that approved.”

For Shaw and Gibbs, opening a farm stand was a more practical move than selling at farmers markets. “It’s just the two of us,” Shaw says. “We figure if there are some slow moments at the farm stand, we can get more work done on the farm.”

Until the spring harvest arrives, the farm stand will operate on a pop-up basis over the next few months, posting to their Facebook and Instagram accounts as they plan upcoming dates.

“We didn’t want to wait until Spring,” Shaw says. “We want to see if people can find us.”

Find Small City Farm at 1401 Auten Rd.