What a keeper is really choosing

Every chapter here has been one argument from different directions: a farm does not sell what it makes, it sells what a channel's buyers will take, at a price they think fair, from a name they already trust a little or a lot.

None of those three is fixed. A keeper:

• sets the price
• chooses the channel
• slowly earns the trust

All three matter more than how many hives stand in the yard.

That is why the choice at the start of this book is the whole of it. Twelve a kilo today at the co-op, or eighteen over a month of nights at the stand, is a trade between certainty and patience every keeper makes for themselves, the same trade a market stall or a parcel by post makes at a different speed.