Direct marketing is multifaceted. Currently, there are many farms that also offer home delivery services via vegetable, fruit or mixed subscriptions. Recently, the ongoing pandemic has strengthened these home delivery services and farms who offered them, saw a large growth in their vegetable or fruit subscriptions, certainly last year, according to the Landwirtschaftliche Informationsdienst. 
The difficult weather situation has also affected the prices of Swiss vegetables: Indicative prices between producers and buyers have risen as produce has been scarcer and production costs have gone up - (lid)
Volume procurement
Vegetable subscription customers of course also wanted to be supplied this year. However, due to the exceptional weather conditions this summer, the range of Swiss-grown vegetables was severely limited in some cases, not as abundant as usual. Markus Waber, deputy director of the Association of Swiss Vegetable Producers, estimated at the beginning of October that there was a shortfall of 10 to 20 percent of the usual volumes across the entire vegetable range at the height of summer. In some cases, the gaps even had to be filled with imports. The situation was particularly tense in the case of open-grown products such as cauliflower and broccoli - vegetables that are also very popular, which did not necessarily alleviate the problem.
Domestic vegetables
Vegetable producer Heinz Höneisen, on the other hand, had fewer problems with the available volumes, despite a total crop failure on about 15 hectares. "We have a relatively large vegetable crop and so had enough produce to fill our vegetable subscriptions," he explains. As it happens, he says, they also did a significant overcropping this year, and when various crops such as potatoes died and rotted in the rain, they were still able to harvest just enough volume during the poor summer. And if there was still a shortage, the wholesalers simply got less.
Difficult start to the season
Urs Gaupp from the Gaupp AG nursery in Untervaz in the canton of Grisons also grows all the produce for his vegetable subscriptions himself, and he too had no problems putting together the subscriptions in the summer. "In the Chur Rhine Valley, we have a very sandy and light soil that allows a lot of water to pass through," he explains. In summer, therefore, the region was not affected by the problem of crops drowning. The long, cold spring, on the other hand, was much worse. At the beginning of May, when the season started, he had problems producing enough produce to fill the subscriptions: "The vegetable crates had to be prepared, but the Kohlräbli were only as big as nickels," says Urs Gaupp, illustrating the situation.
Smaller supply
In addition to procuring sufficient volumes, it also required a great deal of coordination to put together an attractive and varied range, says Dominik Eggli about the situation in the Bernese Seeland. "We always asked our producers first whether they had enough, depending on the vegetable, so that we could fill all subscriptions on our side," he explains. If this was not the case, they had to remove the product from the subscription range and switch to another product. "So there was maybe a little less variety this summer than usual."
