BIG ISLAND -- Only a few yards from their home tucked in a quiet valley in northern Bedford County, the Colemans have assembled their own makeshift country store.

Newborn kittens prowl around the legs of wooden furniture, panting dogs sprawl on the front porch and a hand-painted sign out front tells anyone who drives around the pond and down the quarter-mile gravel driveway that Mountain Run Farm meats are sold here.

It's more of a drive and slightly harder to find than the grocery store, but inside their impromptu store is a freezer stocked with perfectly packaged ground beef, sirloin and filet mignon that costs usually just a bit more than at the local Kroger or Food Lion. In April through September, they sell 150 freshly butchered chickens monthly. For Thanksgiving, they'll sell turkeys.

Direct selling can be more profitable for farmers than distributing through supermarkets. The Colemans sell ground beef for $3.70 a pound, all of that, minus expenses, goes to their bottom line. The average supermarket price of ground beef in July was $2.66, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and farmers typically received about a 45 percent share.

Ben and Carly Coleman, the young couple who run this farm, are seeing their customer base steadily grow. And they're not the only ones.

"We're getting a lot of new customers," Ben Coleman said. "You can come in here and see me and I take full responsibility for what [you] are getting."

In the rapidly growing Franklin and Bedford counties, farmers are increasingly marketing their products directly to consumers. As subdivisions sprout up on the edges of their land, farmers are finding many of the suburbanites are interested in buying products straight off the farm.

"For the farmer, in some ways it's sort of a double-edged sword, because with development you have the loss of land, but you also get a bigger customer base for selling vegetables and fresh fruit and other farm products," said Eric Bendfeldt, a Virginia Cooperative Extension agent in Harrisonburg who has worked to educate Virginia farmers about selling directly to consumers.

The dollar value of agriculture products sold directly to consumers increased by 52 percent in Bedford County, to $327,000, and by 34 percent, to $409,000, in Franklin County from 1997 to 2002, according to the Agriculture Census, conducted every four years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And those in the farming industry say it's still on the rise. In that same period, both counties saw a decrease in total number of farms.

Franklin and Bedford counties have been the two fastest growing in Southwest Virginia since the 1990 census. A University of Virginia population estimate released in 2006 showed Franklin slightly outpacing Bedford in growth from 2000-05, while Bedford was the leader in previous years.

Smith Mountain Lake has fueled much of that growth, which is why lake area residents got their own farmers market in May. A Franklin County couple that sells produce assembled the weekly event on an empty lot in Westlake, one of the lake's most rapidly growing commercial developments.

"One of the reasons we picked the area of Westlake is because of the development that's there. And there are more people living there year-round," said Janice Walke, who co-founded the market with her husband. "We can see a definite increase in the number of people attending the market since we started in May, and a definite increase in the money that we're making each week."

The most common direct marketing outlets are farmers markets and roadside stands. Because of government standards for meat and dairy, produce is a much easier and thus a more common product to sell. But there are farmers such as the Colemans who sell meat, as well as those who sell dairy products and even live animals intended for slaughter directly to consumers in the area.

"The market's getting a little better each year," said David Cooper, a hobby farmer who has been selling products such as peaches, sweet corn, yellow squash and tomatoes at the Rocky Mount Farmers Market for 12 years. "The lake people come down here more often."

From produce to pigs

The increasing demand for fresh farm products shows no signs of slowing, said Sue Puffenbarger, a cooperative extension agent in Franklin County.

"It seems like the public wants the on-farm sales -- they want local," she said. From her perspective, farmers have really started responding to that demand in the past five years.

With consumers increasingly conscious of their food's origins, areas nationwide with urban and suburban growth are seeing a similar trend, said Denise Mainville, an assistant professor of agricultural marketing at Virginia Tech.

"The real growth area in direct marketing does tend to come from people who are new to an area or in a suburb -- a wealthier area -- who have leisure time to spend," Mainville said.

Nationwide, the number of farmers markets more than doubled from 1994 to 2004, increasing from 1,755 to 3,706, according to USDA statistics.

"People are more aware today of the importance of the quality of their food to their health than they were 20 years ago, so there has been a great upsurge of farmers markets throughout the country because of that," Walke said. "We're actually trying to meet an increased demand for healthy food in the community."

There is also an increasing desire among people to have a relationship with where their food is coming from, Mainville said.

"Previously, organic used to be local. It was based on a local standard rather than national. At the same time, there have been people who have said, 'I associated organic with local. What I think I really want is to know the person that I'm buying from,' " she said. "There's an increasing emphasis for some consumers away from organic to local."

Huddleston residents Andra and Carl Wurzer wanted to know their meat's origins after Andra was sickened twice by grocery store pork.

So last year they purchased two young pigs from Jeff Cox, a member of the Bedford County Farm Bureau board and local farmer.

Cox started selling live pigs about three years ago when he realized there was unmet demand for them. About 40 people like the Wurzers buy pigs each year in the early spring and raise them until the fall or winter and have them slaughtered. They range from people with farming backgrounds to some who raise them in their back yards in 10-by-10-foot pens with a shelter, Cox said.

The pigs were 19 pounds when the Wurzers purchased them and 245 pounds when they were slaughtered at the end of that year. One year later, they still have plenty of meat in the freezer. And it tastes far better than what they would buy at the store, Andra Wurzer said.

This is one of perhaps the most extreme examples of direct sales in the area, but Cox said there's a waiting list each year for his pigs, which sell for about $40 each.

"It's a growing industry. It's really taking off," Cox said of direct sales. "And it helps farmers too, because it cuts out many middle men."

Earning a living

Cutting out the middle man gives farmers the freedom to set their own prices and to keep all of the money that product brings in rather than having to share it with wholesalers, distributors and grocery stories.

"A big advantage to direct marketing is the farmer sets the price instead of somebody else telling them what they're going to get," said Scott Baker, a Bedford County Cooperative Extension agent. "It's not going to replace all of conventional-type marketing, but there is a significant opportunity for more and more people to do this."

It can bring a solid supplementary income at a time when many farmers struggle to turn a profit, but is often not enough to be the farmer's sole source of income.

Cooper and the Walkes farm mostly as a hobby. The Colemans' main income comes from their 215-cow commercial beef operation.

The Colemans started raising a separate herd of female cows who were unable to become pregnant for direct sales -- starting with one several years ago, and increasing to 16 this year.

"This was a way to get some extra money coming in," Ben Coleman said, wearing a T-shirt that read "No Farms, No Food."

"It's not a lot, but it helps," he said.

They raise their direct sale cows separate from the rest of the herd. They're grass-fed and hormone-free, and altogether the meat from one cow brings in more than $2,000.

This covers all the costs, including that to drive the cows two hours away to have them slaughtered by a certified butcher, and allows the Colemans several hundred dollars' profit from each cow. Coleman said he'd profit about $50 from a cow sold at a livestock market.

But something as mundane as bad weather can hurt direct sales, said Scott Sink, who sells sweet corn and pumpkins directly and is president of the Franklin County Farm Bureau board. And farmers must also adjust to direct contact with consumers, which many are unaccustomed to.

"For people to be direct marketers, you have to have a very sound business plan but also a marketing plan," Bendfeldt said. "For some people, actually having the marketing skills or the people skills to interact with the customers, that's something that has to be developed."

Four days before the Colemans were anticipating 200 guests to come through their farm on the Bedford County Farm Tour, they're noticeably anxious about making sure they'll make a good impression. It's a good opportunity to move some of their products, and Ben Coleman hired some help to come in and make sure everything down to the lawn is perfect.

He anticipates that the direct interaction with customers and his business of direct sales will continue to grow. They've recently begun selling their meat out of a cooler at the Bedford Farmers Market and he said he'll increase his direct sales herd to as big as he can manage.

"The days of being a price taker and just selling your cows at the market are going to be gone," he said. "I wanted to be a price maker, not a price taker."