AdAgrA Conference 2024: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Market Gardening Track

Michelle Sullivan

Robert Sullivan

Starting a Farm without Experience

Okay, so what we'll do is we'll just start with a word of prayer.

We want to make sure that we have God's blessing as we share.

So if you can adopt a posture of reverence as we pray.

Father in heaven, again we're thankful that we have this opportunity.

We're thankful for everything that you give us, the breath that we have.

And As we come this morning and we share your goodness and some of your insights, we just ask Lord that your Holy Spirit will rest upon each of our minds and more importantly our hearts and hopefully The prayer is that we can take away something, each 1 of us can take away something from this presentation to apply in our lives as soon as physically possible.

These things we ask in Jesus' name we pray.

Okay, so just so that we're all aware, I did have up on the screen just my name, Robert Sullivan, it was just a typo, it's myself and my wife.

And, just so that you're aware, we are coming to you from the United Kingdom.

So, if you know anything about the United Kingdom, or if you've been to the United Kingdom, or if you've seen it on a map, we're quite north.

So that's important, because for many of you, if you're thinking of growing or have been growing you'll know that you really want the optimum sort of temperature, conditions, you know, all of that.

But having said that, we're in the northern, and we're still able to do...

Do we assume that everybody here hasn't grown before?

Maybe you could raise your hand if you have done some growing.

And raise your hand if you've done no growing at all?

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well that was myself.

And we assume also that nobody here is actually farming.

If you're farming could you raise your hand?

Like you're actually farming for a living.

Like a market garden or something like that.

Because we assume that those that have done some gardening probably are home gardening, right?

But as I said before, it's not a technical, this 1 is not a technical, like, do it this way and do it that way and buy this equipment and that equipment.

This is more about our story and how we started that experience.

Because believe it or not, when we started, I had only grown 1 cherry tomato plant on my windowsill.

In fact, it was 1 of our sons that did that.

We produced 1 cherry tomato, and in an instant, as it blushed, he plucked it, he was 3 years old, and he plucked it from the bush, popped it in his mouth and it was all over.

So the question is, just making sure, why?

And without going into too much depth, we did a lot of, okay, let me backtrack.

So on our Christian walk, we reached a stage where we wanted to get closer to God and actually have more of an experience with God.

And in that journey, I remember thinking to myself, well, I know there were a few texts in the Bible that spoke about that God formed us and before that he kind of had a plan for each 1 of us and that kind of resonated with me because I said to myself well if God has a plan for us and for me specifically I wonder what that plan is.

I mean I've got my own plan, you know, and at the time...

We have been doing our own plan for many years.

You know, and you know, success or not success in human eyes, whatever.

But as we started taking our walk with the Lord seriously we were contemplating this, well what is it that God would have in store for us specifically?

And The more we read, actually I'll go to this, we were looking at, the question was we were asking ourselves is what is God's original occupation?

And it will give you the context for why we then did what we did and why we're here today to be able to share going forward.

In God's plan for Israel, every family had a home on the land with sufficient ground for tilling.

Daniel Nicholls

We grew it! Now what do we do with it?

All righty, I am going to go ahead and get started.

I am so happy to see you all interacting.

That's what I really like to come to the conferences for, is exactly what you were all just doing.

That being said, I'm assuming you're here for the class, so I'm going to get rolling on that so we can make the most of the time that we have.

Because if I start telling myself noon, next thing you know, I'll realize it's 11.30 and I kept you 10 minutes late.

I am the Agriculture Director at Holbrook Indian School.

So I teach our gardening classes, manage our farm operations, have a handful of other roles that I have at the school, as many people do who work at an institution.

And this class is intended to talk about exactly what I have here.

We're exploring options for marketing and selling your produce.

So I'm going to start with a prayer, and we'll go ahead and begin.

Father in heaven, thank you for the opportunity to be here, not just in Adagra, but here, this time in history, this church, this movement of people that you raised up and are continuing to raise up.

So grateful for the knowledge of what you're doing, what you want to do in the world at these times, and may the time that we spend here at at Agra in this classroom, wherever we are over the course of this conference, be A blessing to ourselves, to each other, but Lord, especially to our communities and the places where you have put us to minister.

And may the time in this classroom now especially Be productive to that end that you can guide and teach and bless us so that we can then impart what you've given to those around us.

I ask for special insight and I ask for your spirit to be present not just with myself but with all of us here.

We're grateful we can ask for these gifts.

You delight to give us these blessings in Jesus name.

So I told you who I am, I told you what I do.

This class is intended, okay, to be for somebody who's at the very early stages of starting a market garden, okay, or some sort of agriculture gardening based business that involves growing a product and then trying to sell it.

If you are already working at a market garden, If you already have an agriculture business where you have products that you are selling, it's already going well, You might not get a lot out of this class.

You might get some ideas, and you could probably help me fill in some gaps, but this class is intended to be an overview.

It's an overview of the most common options for selling your produce.

There are other ways that are not going to be mentioned here that you could use to market and sell your produce.

Now, produce is gonna be the term that I mostly use here, produce product.

This could be referring to, you know, fruits and vegetables that you've grown in an orchard or a garden.

This could be referring to value-added products, okay?

So value-added is a little bit of a different ballgame though.

So there's a lot of, and I'll define that term here in a second.

So don't get caught up on the term itself.

Value added is a little bit of a different ballgame because sometimes there are different laws and regulations and things surrounding the sales of value-added products.

And this class does not have the capacity to cover that.

A value-added product is, let's say you grow strawberries, and then you process those strawberries into jam.

So that does fit into the constraints of some of the things we're going to talk about here.

But there are things about value added products that make them also fall outside of the realm of products like produce and cut flowers.

Because You need to know things about the actual processing of those.

Sometimes you have to have a registered or a, yeah, licensed kitchen.

You have to have a food handlers certificate.

Who you sell it to, the way taxing works and all that.

That is all going to change once you get into the value added territory.

But some of the basic ideas here are going to come across, okay?

If you have, if you would like details on each specific option, I can tell you, AudioVerse, okay?

They're recording us right now, or at least they're recording me.

And if you go on AudioVerse and you look up the previous conferences, you're going to be able to find people who did an entire class on just 1 of the methods that I'm going to talk to you about today.

So if it's farmers markets, you're going to find multiple presentations on selling at farmers markets, whole presentations, hours of material on farmers markets.

So this is not a detailed presentation, it's an overview.

So if you're saying, if you find yourself saying, okay, great, I just grew, what, you know, throw and fill in the blank.

I just, we just had a, you know, 400-pound harvest of tomatoes.

What are you going to do with all those tomatoes, right?

That's what hopefully, after you leave, you're not asking yourself that question.

Just a reminder, as we see some people doing already, which is awesome, and I encourage that, if you think you might get more out of another class, I encourage you to find that class.

I'm going to ask that we do questions at the end.

So, before you get too worried about how you're going to sell your produce, here's a couple things to know.

So, first of all, now what is not a question you want to find yourself asking once you already have the produce.

All right, it helps to know how you are planning to sell your produce before you start growing it in any sort of volume.

Lucia Tiffany

Harvesting Success: Strategic Marketing Basics for Farmers Part 2

So I'm going to talk a little bit about some tools that you can use with the research that you've done, the things you've learned, the data you've collected, as you've learned more about the people that you are serving.

So 1 of the most important assets you can build in your business is an email list.

How many of you know influencers on social media and they have 100, 000 followers?

Okay, what's really interesting to me is that I've reached out to a number of those people because I host summits.

That's 1 of the things I do for the health area and so I will host summits and get experts to come and talk on their area of expertise on my summit.

And some of those people have hundred thousand people on their social media following list, and they have no email list, so they don't come on my summit, because I only do it for presenters that have email lists.

But your most valuable asset, if you ever want to sell your business, maybe you decide you want to move into something else and somebody else can do what you're doing, your email list is going to be a big part of the value of your business.

So whatever you're doing, always be looking to get those contacts on an email list that you can track, that you can communicate with, that you can share your value with in a way that is going to be useful to them.

So using a list server is really the only way to do it effectively.

I know some people that do Google distribution list in Gmail.

But those are not very effective because spam filters kick a lot of those out if you have multiple addresses on an email.

A lot of people are not even seeing your emails if you do that.

And most of us don't have the time or the resources to do 1 by 1 emails.

MailChimp is a good starter 1 if you haven't used 1 before.

Go High level is a fairly new product, but it's building a very good reputation.

And they have an extraordinary number of features, which you probably won't need if you're starting, but it's great for growing into.

And they have a CRM, customer response management program, built into it so that it's easy to track your communications with your people.

So like it's 1 thing to get everybody's name on an email list, but it's another to be able to say, oh, Who hasn't responded to anything I sent out for 6 weeks?

Or who's been opening every single email I sent out?

And to be able to respond and then send them a text or send them an email back or give them a phone call.

Because maybe they're knowing and liking you enough that they're ready to buy from you.

I think it's customer relations management.

You want some kind of a system as you're growing that you can do this.

You can start by just having an email list that allows you to segment.

Go high level has more features for the price right now.

Because they're new in the market, they're trying to undercut.

So you can get in on them at a much lower price than some other software that does a lot of the same things.

So depending on how fast you want to grow and how many resources you want to put into your marketing, Go High Level might be a good fit.

I have a lot of my colleagues that are entrepreneurs that are using Go High Level.

I have some of my mentors that are moving to Go High Level from what they were using before.

So it's getting traction and it seems to have really good customer service.

And those are things that can be really important.

Anybody here not sure what I mean when I say that?

So when you have a server like MailChimp, oh, that little thing came up again.

So, segmenting your list is super useful for your communication.

You know how we talked about how important communication is?

So, segmenting is how you communicate more effectively.

It means that if you know somebody is only interested in your skin products, but they're not interested in your tonic, you're not going to be sending them emails about how good your tonic is, Because they really want your skin product.

So maybe they like your baked goods, but they're not really interested in your produce, or vice versa.

So knowing what your customers really like about what you're offering is helpful, because then you can tell them when you have a sale on their favorite products, or group of products, or category of products, versus things they're not interested in.

So when you collect people's emails, you have the option with MailChimp or ActiveCampaign or GoHigh Level to put a tag on their name that gives you information about where they came from.

You just put your name, your email, and your phone number, and you get something.

How many of you have ever used 1 of those?

OK, when you do that, the back end is hooked up so whoever is collecting your information knows what the advertisement was around it, what it was that you were signing up for.

So for me, people can sign up that they're interested in nutrition.

Or they can sign up that they want to reverse diabetes.

I don't necessarily send the same stuff to both people.

I have some people on my list that are people that came to my public school adult education diabetes reversal class and none of them are Adventists.

So I have them tagged so I know who they are.

So I'm not necessarily sending them some of my other content.

It depends on who they are and where they are in their customer journey, which we're gonna talk about in a minute.

Also, as you do your research, you might find that you wanna create product variations based on what you learn.

So like I learned when I was talking to the organic food store about selling my microgreens, I learned that they liked 2 specific sizes.

They wanted a small package and they wanted a larger package.

So I had 2 different kinds of clam shells because it was 2 different price points.

So I sold wholesale to them, which meant they bought more volume and so I had a lower margin, but they bought more volume.

And so they got a good price so they could still market up and still be in the market.

They paid top dollar For the same microgreens.

Okay, so don't get stuck thinking that because you think your product is worth this much, that's the only price you can sell it at.

The price you sell it at is what its value is for the customer.

Okay, And a lot of that can be around service, around quality, around excellence.

Like my microgreens, they could put in the fridge and they looked good 2 weeks later.

That's a huge, huge selling point for stores and chefs.

Hydroponic microgreens do not hold up that way.

So sorry if some of you are doing hydroponics.

But there's just a difference in the way that the plants grow.

You might find that you want to do custom packages.

Sometimes that's where the money is, where you take custom orders and you bundle stuff in specific ways for people that they like special.

You know, you have different things and those can be valuable to people.

So if you make it easy for them to pick up what you've got or to get what you have, that's really nice.

Delivery options would include things like an automatic download when somebody signs up.

They can get what they're looking for right now.

Harvesting Success: Strategic Marketing Basics for Farmers Part 1

So before we get going I want to ask you a question.

Now let me see, oh let me tell you first the purpose today.

Which is to explore effective entrepreneurial marketing principles for the market farmer or whoever you are.

This is apparently not all of you are market farmers, that's fine.

But I want you to be able to optimize your marketing time, your efforts, and your money.

How many of you think that might be a good idea and you're interested?

So that's what the purpose is of being here today.

And we're going to cover some main points.

We're going to be talking about marketing and branding.

We're going to be talking about clarity around your avatar, foundational marketing principles as well as some product development and positioning.

So that's kind of what we're looking at in this session.

We're going to have a little break before we go into the second session.

And my connection question for you is I want you to think about what you want to get out of this pair of sessions and why that's important for you.

All right, so find a partner, move around if you need to, and share with your partner why you came to this class this afternoon and why that's important to you.

So I'd like 2 people to share what your partner shared with you.

I just want to get a little bit of a flavor for what you all said.

If somebody volunteered, just raise your hand, what your partner shared with you.

So my partner over here, what was your name?

I told her I walked over here with somebody from New York.

Anyway, she grew, for the first time I think, a garden last year, and had a ton of produce that she ended up giving away.

So she's thinking that it might be a better option to sell her.

We're gonna be talking about different things that are gonna help you with your marketing.

So just really quick, for those of you that weren't in my class this morning, if you were in my class this morning, you can like doodle or do something else right now.

I got started as an entrepreneur as a kid.

My mom would pay me to help her make granola and bread.

And then when I was a teenager, I grew alfalfa sprouts with a friend of mine to sell to a local health food store.

That was when it was kind of a new thing, that they were just commercially really selling sprouts.

Back to Menu

Series

Market Gardening Track

The Cold Hard Truth About Winter CSA

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Parts

Starting a Farm without Experience

1h 4m

We grew it! Now what do we do with it?

59m

Harvesting Success: Strategic Marketing Basics for Farmers Part 2

52m

Harvesting Success: Strategic Marketing Basics for Farmers Part 1

48m

Post Harvest Secrets for the Market Gardener

58m

3 Keys to Juggling Your Market Garden Like a Pro

1h 7m

The Cold Hard Truth About Winter CSA

54m

When Efficiency Makes You Enjoy Your (Farm) Life

54m

A Balancing Act

59m

Maintenance and Repair of the Most Important Farm Tool: Your Body

1h 18m

Sound Doctrine