Mark Stanley, with ten greenhouses at Help From Above Farm, near Crawford’s, has a similar story. The greenhouses were all built by Stanley, his eight children, and a few laborers at a cost that grew into the six figures. Chard, basil, arugula, lettuce, tomato seedlings, and puntarella (an Italian chicory) were all going strong in the half-acre of enclosed space in the early spring. Another 20 acres outside were soon to be sown. The output will be split between TOG and Whole Foods, which has also pushed into local produce in a big way.

When I asked Stanley, a biodynamic-trained farmer turned born-again Christian, why he only sells wholesale, he says he found farmers’ markets too time consuming. “We were up at 2 a.m. and returned home at 6 p.m. and my wife had two babies on her lap at the market,” he says. “Plus, I would take five cases of lettuce to the market and come back with two. And what would you do with those?” Now he can sell 100 cases in one shot and earn enough to support his family.

Many farmers who don’t want to market their own food, or live too far from markets, or who don’t drive (such as the Amish) need vibrant wholesale channels to survive. Now the biggest issue confronting them—and perhaps the entire local foods movement—is the lack of farms. “The big bottleneck is not being able to meet demand,” Crawford says. “We’ve gotten growers to ramp up, to do more, but we’re not keeping up. There’s never enough.”

But without distributors like Tuscarora Organic Growers and Organically Grown Company, there’d be even fewer still.

Sam Fromartz is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and the author of Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew. He blogs at www.chewswise.com.