AdAgrA 2021: Hidden Treasure

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Kirsten Knecht

Nick Knecht

Marketing

Better Photos for Your Farm

Luke Fisher

Market Stands and Local Wholesales

So today's Topic, I just said it on the, the end of Aunt Pam. I'll take the liberty to call her Aunt Pam's marketing workshop. And, and I will reiterate a few things that she mentioned that good points that she made my, I'm particularly cover covering farmer's market in local wholesale. Our, we've been market gardening for as long as we've been married, plus three years or so before that. So yeah, it's been 2020, about 11, 12 years now. So I'll just be sh sharing something from my experience. I am by no means an expert, but I have made my primary living by farming for the last market, gardening for the last decade and have survived by, by the Lord's grace somehow. So as Aunt Pam was saying, the first principle of, of good market gardening is having a good product in the, in the factory engineering world they would call this to, to pull, not push, basically grow what you need and grow a good quality product. Grow something that somebody wants to buy. I was gonna have a slideshow with the, the, the main points, but I found on my computer, I don't have keynote on this computer, so you can email me later and I can send you the, send you the notes. Anyway. So back to back to the marketing, you know, cus why would, why would you go shop at a farmer's market or join a local csa? Any, anybody here ever shop at a farmer's market? Quality. Quality, You do it because you want, that's one of the reasons is quality. So, so customers want fresh produce and it should look and taste good. So that's the first thing. That's just a general, general principle. So if, if you are New to gardening, you know, first how, basically how I got into market gardening is I grew up on a family farm. We always grew a big garden and we, and my dad runs a feed store and he, when I was a kid, he would, he had a asparagus business and he would sell asparagus, some local, some wholesale. We'd also plant a lot of tomatoes and we'd sell extra tomatoes at the feed store and extra sweet corn. So basically anything you can grow, well you can probably sell. So just start by growing a home garden. And if you start growing more than than you can eat, then you can consider transitioning into market gardening. So that's the first thing. Grow something that people would want to buy. So I started out with a market stand at a, at a farmer's market. Now as a, as a Seventh Day Adventist, you may have noted that most farmers markets are on Saturdays. So this is the big problem with farmer's market as a, a sabbath keeper. Fortunately, our town, our nearest city Tulsa, had a Wednesday farmer's market, a midweek market, only a fraction of the amount of customers as the Saturday market. But I started attending there and, and would, you know, sell a hundred or $2 in four hours or so and my first year and, but there was one, one couple that were serious market gardeners and they, and their, their primary business was a Saturday market, but they had a midweek CSA farm stand and I watched a lot of what they did and pretty much everything that I do growing and marketing wise is just copying what I saw them do. And as I've matured in my experience and read more books, I realized that there's a lot of other professionals that do do what they do. But I just was copying the stand right next to me. And eventually we were probably the one of the larger vendors at that market before we quit going at the other, the other couple, I think they were just there for ministry purposes, not spiritual ministry, but to keep the market open. They were kind of the anchor for that farmer's market. And after and after my stand was up and running fairly well, they, and they were probably making so much money, they just stuck with their Saturday market and let me take care of the Wednesday market. But eventually we decided we didn't need to go to that market either. Just not enough customers on a midweek to be reliable. And there's, we can only grow so many vegetables and wanted to do something basically. We could have done it, but we decided to focus more closer to home. So back to the farm stand, people mostly like to buy their favorite vegetables. So you need to make sure you bring plenty of what your local customers want. And you learn that by experience. You've learned that by knowing people, by asking people, Hey, what do you want more of? What do you not want to see here anymore? So, but people really like to buy things that they eat at home every, every day. Lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes in the Midwestern community in the south, you know, you people really want their okra, their melons, their collards and, and other things like that. In other places they might want something else. So I don't know your own community, but the way you like to eat, the way your neighbors like to eat this is the kind of things they want at the market. So make sure that you always have plenty of those. Everybody always likes strawberries. So strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes, those are pretty, pretty good things to sell now, like nobody in my family likes rido. We nobody ever grew up eating fava beans. But when I was at the Tulsa farmer's market, we had some Italian customers that just raved and raved about them, bought me out every time that I brought Annie, I tried selling them to my customers in Bristow, small town, Oklahoma. And they never seen these things. They never, they didn't want any bitter lettuce they want. So, so, but it's what people grew up with, that's what they want. So just get to know your market. The the other reason people will shop at a farmer's market or join a CSA is you can get superior quality because it's local, it's harvested fresh. There's certain crops like tomatoes, strawberries, sweet corn that the grocery store cannot compete with. You people will pay double, triple to get stuff that tastes three times as good and you know, you're not gonna be able to compete on scale. Most likely with commercial growers in the national produce industry, they'll undercut you on price on strawberries for sure, but that doesn't matter because your strawberries will taste three times as good and people will pay three times or more as much for them. So that's what you need to focus on. Things that, that are gonna bring a premium for the market. And those things are things that fresh and local are a real quality advantage. People at the same time are intrigued by something new and different and are interested to try new and different things. And so if you want to have more than just lettuce and tomatoes at your, at your farm stand, you can try new things and what's new will be different for every community in our community. People had never, they, people had no idea what Cole Robby was. And I still get a trickle of customers that don't know what kohlrabi is or Japanese white salad turnips, a variety that Dani sells called Hak. Really excellent. They're farmer's market standards, but people that have never been to a farmer's market might have never eaten them cuz you can't get them at your local Walmart grocery store. Or maybe they didn't grow up eating them, but they're really great vegetables and if people try them, they might learn to like them. So our, where I've been running a CSA and farmer's market of farm stand for 10 years now, they're like all the local food shoppers in Bristow really love kohlrabi and, and Japanese salad turnips when they had never seen them or heard of them five years ago. So you can introduce new things to a market, it just, just don't put everything exotic. People wanna buy their staples every week. Let me say something really quick on this topic. I was the one who introduced the kohlrabi idea. Luke, I don't think it ever even had kohlrabi before we were married, but I traveled in Europe a fair amount and they love kohlrabi over there and we were so impressed by it. We were like, where is this vegetable bin all of our lives? Anyway, we actually gave people little samples at first and that would have been a little more difficult to do in the year of covid, but no one has ever tasted one of those two things without being like, oh, let me buy a bunch. Also, if we're like super enthusiastic as we're introducing a particular kind of vegetable to someone, most likely they'll try it. And if it is a quality that it ought to be, they will not be disappointed. And you know, I've said many times, oh my kids just, they'll eat them raw. They love these and just, you know, being excited about what you're growing and what you're producing is very useful. And one tip, you know, use the produce that you're selling on a regular basis so that you can give people ideas and tips on how to use it and notice the little things about it because they can all become selling points. I remember we started to grow a particular variety of eggplant and I couldn't tell you the name right now of it off the top of my head, but I noticed when I would use it when I was peeling it, it didn't turn brown like the other kinds of eggplant or at least didn't turn brown very fast. And I would tell people that and we would sell out on that just because I would tell tell them that little tip. All right, so as far as marketing goes, it's okay to start small if you've got a day job, you don't need to make your living market market farming. The first year I, I was nursing whenever I started, I still nurse every during the off season a shift every few weeks. My wife's also a nurse, but we don't, don't make our living nursing anymore, we make our living farming. But at the beginning, whenever I was investing in the business starting, I couldn't make a living off of a few hundred dollars a week very easily. But, but, but it's okay to start small now the thing about marketing is the big, like there's a sweet spot if you're, and I guess we'll get into this a little bit more, but there's two things you can, you can sell, you can sell convenience or you can sell experience and there's a sweet spot for experience. If you just have a small stand with three things on it and one person walking by every 10 minutes, it's not much of an experience for the customer. But if you at what makes part of what makes the farmer's market experience interesting and exciting is, is the community feel a lot of people there, bustling, busy, a lot of things happening and it's just kind of a fun and interesting place to be. And you can see all of your friends that you haven't seen all week and you can stand around and chat. And so, and part of what you're selling is the experience. And so if you get too big and you are a Walmart Supercenter and everything is industrialized, then you lose the experience on the other end. So finding that sweet middle ground of where you, where it's busy enough to be bustling, but small enough to be personable is where you want to be. And, and we've, and and we've been, and we've worked on perfecting that, not perfect, but that's something that we try to achieve. So we, with our local marketing, we quit going to the farmer's market mostly because we had to get up so early in the morning, get everything packed. It started at seven in the morning and it was an hour to drive, which means, and you had to get there 30 min hour ahead, which meant leaving with the trailer at five in the morning. So with four, with four kids, this is not practical. So anyway, we do af e afternoon, evening deliveries now and, and since we don't go to Saturday farmer's markets, we set, we started our own farmer's market and, but it's just basically a one farmer farmer's market. In our local town of Bristow, there's a big empty parking lot where there used in the old Walmart parking lot behind the Maos. And between Maos and Tractor Supply, there's a big empty space. So I, 10 years ago I just went and talked to the Maos manager and the tractor supply manager and was like, Hey, can I sell vegetables here in this empty space? And they're like, great, you go for it. And so between mid-April and end of July and later we're there every Thursday evening, five to six and we're just there for one hour and we do our CSA delivery at the same time as our market stand is set up. So we automatically have 30 people show up during that one hour space and which, which is a bustling little market for one hour and it attracts a crowd of people driving by. They see 2015 people out there at a time bustling around couple market tents and, and more, more people come. But that's basically the basis of our, of our business model is doing a CSA delivery in conjunction with, with the, with the farm stand. Here's a few pictures of our farm stand. We try to stack all our whole bunch of vegetables up on the tables all at once. And so it starts to look impressive. The more stuff you have set out there, the more people are likely to want to come and buy some. So we stack the tables as high as we can balance them and as they, as the vegetables get taken off, we just keep them piled up until about, until we start getting them all sold and then it tapers down at the end. So we typically set up our farm stand like an L shape and one side of it is our CSA customer service line. And the other side is for our drive up walkup customers. And we just, we run both at the same time. We've been there long enough that people kind of know which line to go to. But once in a while, you know, people will get confused and it's easy to shuffle them around. We can move vegetables back and forth, but we generally keep track of, you know, we pre count the vegetables that we need for the CSA table so we can make sure that CSA gets all their premium vegetables. And then we're selling all the extras on the slide all at the same time. And I just wanna say this spring, I'd mentioned in the last seminar that we change things to drive through for a couple of months and it was, it was pretty crazy that it was, it worked, but we would have these huge long lines of vehicles snaked out. We were serving them as fast as we could. And I remember one day one of the workers at Tractor Supply came out and they were like, what are you doing here? Like, what are you selling? I want some. And we hadn't even told her what we were selling. She's like, I wanna buy some, what are you selling? She's like, if all these people want what you're selling, I know I want it too. Yeah. So we had about, we would have two or three people bagging vegetables as fast as we could, but there was still like a line of 20 cars. So I don't know if you can see on this picture, do you see the little chalkboard signs those on this side of the stand? They don't have prices on them, they just say like, take two bunches of root veggies, take three bunches of green veggies, choose a bag or a head of lettuce, or these kind of things. So we like can divide things up into general categories with experience. You can get to know kind of about what balance of things your, your group of people will want. Our csa so our CSA members don't get pre-bagged pre boxed veggies. They go and pick 'em off of the farm stand and so they get kind of get that farmer's market experience and it saves us the work of bagging all those veggies up ahead of time. There are, there are conveniences of having things pre-bagged. Some people like a surprise of what they get in their box. Some people like to pre-order and you can do online pre-ordering systems and that is selling convenience for the customer. It's extra backend work for you, but you can, but we just get paid for our work. So it's a easier delivery but more work before this one. We're working really hard while we're at the stand and bustling around a lot, We found we've tried pretty much everything that he just mentioned and we found that this is the most satisfying for us and our customers. They like to feel like they're choosing what they want to eat, but because we're directing them, it's not like people can come to the table and say, oh, I just want all of these carrots and then leave all the lettuce. And so we're, we're directing people. You can have one bunch of root veggies, choose carrots or beets or a mixed bunch. And so we're able to use up all the veggies in our garden and yet give people a choice. And they may seem to really like that. This media was brought to you by audio verse, a website dedicated to spreading God's word through free sermon, audio and much more. If you would like to know more about audio verse or if you would like to listen to more sermons, please visit www.audio verse.org.

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Marketing

Market Stands and Local Wholesales

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Better Photos for Your Farm

Market Stands and Local Wholesales

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