And it's not cheap. Nick's customers pay about $300 for one-eighth of a cow, his smallest bulk quantity, which amounts to about 40 pounds of steaks, roasts and ground beef. That works out to about $7.50 a pound - substantially pricier than conventional supermarket beef, but cheaper than what customers might pay at specialty stores.
Beef raised on Jack Straw Farm's chemical-free pastures in White Hall goes for about $4 a pound, but customers must travel to a butcher in York, Pa., to pick it up. They are undeterred.
"I have a waiting list for spring already," said Debra English, who owns the farm with her husband.
Even the most ardent locavores concede that carbon footprints aren't going to shrink if they're always driving, individually, to far-flung "local" farms. Some say that's mitigated because they buy in bulk, limiting travel.
Virginia's Polyface Farm, celebrated for its sustainable farming practices in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and the movie "Food Inc.," created its "metropolitan buying club" to save customers a drive. Every five weeks, Polyface delivers meat, eggs and other products to 28 drop-off sites within three hours of the farm, including one in Annapolis. They have about 1,800 customers who buy that way.
"It's more effective to take one vehicle to the people than for 25 people to come to us," said Daniel Salatin, whose family runs Polyface.
Demand for local products already has led to the creation of more farmers' markets and prompted conventional supermarkets to started offering some local produce. But consumers who still can't find what they want are cooking up other ways of getting it.
For Joan Plisko of Catonsville, that means getting about a dozen friends to order eggs together every two weeks from Carriage House Farms in Stevenson, so fisherman-farmer Clark will be willing to deliver. He leaves 30 dozen eggs in a cooler at Plisko's home, and her friends pick them up there. They pay $3.50 to $4 a dozen.
Plisko also buys Alaskan fish from Clark. She belongs to a separate co-op that orders dry goods like oatmeal and rice through a Pennsylvania natural foods distributor. From spring to fall, she buys a box of fresh vegetables each week from an area organic farm. Year-round, she gets more organic produce through yet another co-op.
Plisko spent an hour one day last week sorting out the organic fruits and vegetables that a fellow co-op member had picked up from a Jessup wholesaler. She opened cases of bananas, mangoes and broccoli and divvied them up into about two dozen laundry baskets, one for each family in the co-op.
The 44-year-old environmental engineer and mother of two didn't mind a bit.
"It's a very well-oiled machine," she said.
