Terms of service

Draft, pending legal review. The mechanics described here are exactly what the site does today. The wording has not been reviewed by a lawyer.

The Pasture Market is a place where farms sell food and livestock directly to the people who eat it. These terms cover using the site, whichever side of a sale you are on.

Who you are buying from

The sale is between you and the farm. We are not the seller. We do not grow, raise, handle, pack or deliver anything listed here, and we do not inspect it. The farm decides what to offer, what to charge, and what condition it arrives in.

What we do is run the marketplace: listings, messages, the payment, and holding that payment for a while so neither side has to trust the other on the first order.

What we charge

Farms pay 6% of the order total on anything paid through the site. Buyers pay nothing beyond the price and any delivery cost the farm sets. Orders paid in person at collection carry no fee, because no money passes through us.

How the money moves

Card payments go to the farm’s own payment account, not to ours. We hold the payout on most orders: the farm can’t be paid until a window has passed, and it never starts when you place the order.

• An order you collect: 10 days from the end of the collection time you chose, or from when the farm marks it ready, if that is later.
• An order the farm delivers: 10 days from when the farm marks it ready.
• An order sent to you: 10 days, starting 5 days after the farm sends it.
• A service booked by quote: 10 days from when the work is marked done and paid, whichever is later.
• A farm visit: held until the day after your visit.
• Herd shares and season boxes are paid to the farm as each payment is made.
• Confirming you have the order releases the payment immediately, and ends the window early.
• Saying nothing releases it automatically when the window is up.
• Raising a problem stops the clock until somebody has looked at it, and the days you had left are given back if you withdraw.

If something is wrong

Raise it on the order while the payment is still held. The farm is asked for their account of what happened and has 3 days to give one. Both sides can attach photographs. Somebody here then reads both accounts and decides, and can refund all or part of the payment.

We decide who the held money goes to. We do not decide whether the food was any good — that is between you and the farm, and if a farm is repeatedly the subject of complaints we deal with the farm rather than adjudicating recipes.

What we ask of farms

• List honestly. What arrives should be what the listing said.
• Follow the rules that apply to what you sell. Some things cannot be shipped, some need a license, and the site will stop you where it can — but the responsibility is yours, not ours.
• Answer disputes. A farm that says nothing gets decided against on the buyer’s account alone, because that is all there is.

Your photos, videos and words

What a farm puts on The Pasture Market stays the farm’s. By listing here, or by sending us photos or videos to use, the farm lets us use them to show people the farm and The Pasture Market: on the site, in our emails, in our social media posts and in our advertising.

• We credit the farm by name, with a link to its page, wherever the format allows it.
• We do not sell a farm’s photos or videos, or give them to anyone else to use for their own purposes.
• A farm can ask us to stop using any of it at any time. We then leave it out of anything new. Posts and ads already published may stay up, and we take them down where we can if asked.
• Send us only what you made yourself or have the right to share, and pictures of people only when they have agreed to be in them.
• When a platform pays us for a post or video that uses a farm’s photos or videos, the farm may receive a share of it, as set out in the program at the time. Orders a post brings in carry our usual fee. We choose what we use; sending something does not mean we will use it.

When a card payment is reversed

When a buyer reverses a card payment with their bank, the card network takes that money back regardless of who was right. It comes out of the farm’s Stripe balance, including payments still being held for their orders. If the balance does not cover it, Stripe collects the rest from the farm, which can include debiting the bank account their payouts go to.

Accounts

You need a confirmed email address to message a farm or place an order. Keep your details accurate — a farm holding food for somebody needs a way to reach them. We may suspend an account that misrepresents what it sells, ignores the rules above, or is used to defraud somebody, and we will say why.

What we are not responsible for

We do not guarantee the quality, safety, legality or fitness of anything sold here, or that a farm will do what it said. Our responsibility is the marketplace working as described: the payment being taken and held correctly, the dispute being read, the refund being sent.

Changes

We will change these terms as the site changes. The date at the top says when the wording last moved. Terms you accepted at a particular checkout — the holding period, the livestock terms — are recorded as you saw them and are not altered afterwards.

See also the refund policy and the privacy policy.