Starting a farm stand

Plenty of stands start as a card table and a coffee can. Before you put one out, it's worth an hour working out which rules apply to what you want to sell and where you want to sell it.

What you sell decides which rules apply

Roughly, the further a product is from "picked and put on the table", the more rules come with it.

• Whole, uncut fruit and vegetables you grew. Usually the least regulated thing you can sell, though some states still want a registration or a produce-safety practice, and some count reselling a neighbour's produce differently from selling your own. Ask.
• Eggs. Many states let small flocks sell without a full licence, but often with conditions on cartons, labels, refrigeration or how many hens you keep. The thresholds differ widely.
• Baked goods, jams and other home-cooked food. These fall under your state's cottage food law, if it has one, which lists what you may make at home, how it must be labelled, and sometimes caps sales or limits where you sell.
• Meat, poultry and dairy. The most regulated. Meat sold to the public generally has to be processed at an inspected facility, and raw milk rules range from allowed at the farm to banned outright depending on the state.
• Plants, flowers, firewood, Christmas trees. Not food, but not always rule-free: nursery stock can need a licence, and firewood can fall under pest quarantines that limit moving it.

Where you put it

Ask your town or county about zoning (some residential zones restrict selling from home), sign rules, and setbacks from the road. The strip along a road is often public right-of-way, and on a state highway the transportation department may have its own rules about stands and signs. Leave space for a car to pull fully off the road.

Two other calls worth making: your insurer, about liability when strangers stop on your property, and your state revenue department, about whether anything you sell is taxable. Fresh food often isn't, but non-food items may be.

Setting up an honesty box

• A box people can drop money into but not lift out of: a slot in a locked box, bolted to the table or post. Empty it more than once a day in season.
• Prices in round numbers (three dollars, five dollars) so nobody needs change, written large enough to read from a car window.
• A payment-app code taped to the table gets you sales from people with no cash, which is a lot of people now.
• Shade for the table, and a cooler with ice packs for anything that wilts or must stay cold.
• A sign readable from both directions, far enough ahead that a driver has time to slow down.
• Somewhere online to post what's on the table and when you're open. A social page is enough, and it's the first thing buyers look for.

Expect to lose a little to theft now and then. Some owners accept it as the cost of not having to sit there; others add a camera or a sign saying there is one, or lean on app payments.