Fighting Food Insecurity in Fremont County

Fremont County’s tenuous food economy was made ever more apparent during the pandemic, when delayed or halted food shipments further reduced availability in the county’s small communities. And growers who were already selling directly to consumers at weekly markets lost the direct link to customers. 

“COVID really got people thinking about it,” Wilson says: There had to be a better way to connect consumers to locally grown food. 

So Wilson and other members of the Lander Valley Farmer’s Market (LVFM) began looking at what others in the state and country were doing and saw a host of online markets. The success of platforms like Local Foods Marketplace, a templated platform that makes it easier for growers to sell to consumers (and one that added 50 new users in the first month of the pandemic alone), and Good Eggs, a grocery delivery service out of California that sources 70 percent of its products locally, suggested the LVFM had a good shot making something work.

“We didn’t go into this saying we’re going to do it,” Wilson says. “We wanted to explore the project and see if it was feasible.”

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Wilson and Anna Smedts, owner of Fancy as Farm and former board member of Wind River Farm to Plate—a Lander nonprofit focused on local food education—approached Michelle Escudero, the LOR Foundation’s Lander community officer with the idea for a pilot. If LOR could help them stand up the online market and pay for a part-time manager for the first six months, they thought they could grow it into a long-term solution to help with Fremont County’s local food access issue.

“They had a vision, a plan, and they were willing to take a chance,” Escudero says. “They had to solicit vendors from across the county. They were bold and not scared of failure and learned from bumps in the road. It was really inspiring to see our agricultural community come together to develop such an elegant solution.”

Speedgoat Market—whose name is a nod to Wyoming’s plentiful pronghorn population (pronghorns are the fastest land mammals in North America)—launched on January 1, 2021, with 10 vendors and 10 customers. The small sample size was intentional in those early weeks as Wilson and Smedts wanted to make sure they ironed out any digital wrinkles before opening the market up to a wider audience. 

By March, Speedgoat was up and fully functional, offering customers an online shopping window Sunday to Tuesday. Producers dropped off products for orders Tuesday evening at the Lander Art District building, and consumers picked their order up the next night at the same time. (Speedgoat is currently looking for volunteers to help with drop-offs and pick-ups during the week; contact Wilson if you’d like to help.) By June, Speedgoat had more than 20 vendors, 55 customers, and was doing a brisk business, having sold more than $10,000 in product since launching. 

“Speedgoat Market has been a way to level out our produce distribution over the year, especially for products like chicken eggs that don’t turn on and off with the seasons like fresh greens and tomatoes do,” says John Gookin, owner of Gookin Family Farms. “It warms my heart to see some of the names of the customers. COVID-19 has reminded me to appreciate small regular connections with my local community.”

While Speedgoat’s initial success is encouraging, it hasn’t solved every challenge: Growers still have to deliver their products to a central location once a week, and customers still have to pick them up. That means many of the county’s more remote communities still don’t have easy access to local foods—and producers don’t have a viable option for meeting them where they are. If growers wanted to attend all seven farmers markets throughout the county, they’d have to drive more than 400 miles and dedicate roughly 40 hours of work to transporting and selling their goods.