An individual small farm has a relatively small amount of surplus production that can be sold after household consumption is met, and it is usually hard to develop a relationship with a broker, distributor or processor that allows the residual production to be sold. The typical fallback option is to rely on direct marketing either through a farm stand or through a farmers' market. Commercial food distribution channels cannot easily deal with individual small farms due to: high fixed costs of contracting for a small volume of product, potential problems with the farmer meeting required quality standards and intermittent supply from a single farm. While a large-scale farm may be able to contract directly with a processor or distributor, small-scale farms require an intermediary who can aggregate small amounts from multiple producers to obtain a large enough amount of uniform quality to be attractive to the processor or distributor.