Small Farm Central

In response to last week's post on social networks for farm marketing, Leaf writes:

Read your latest blog, and am starting to worry about you. You may have to chuck your blackberry in the hedgerow and twitter out to the garden. Trade in you tube for your hoe, so you can digg in the earth. If you have a compulsion to flicker en route, stumble on and face the sun, not face book. In time, you will reach the garden of my space, blogger your way to the compost pile, and replace those widgets with earthworms.

Thanks for your worries Leaf, but I am able to keep a finger or two in the soil with the annual garlic patch. On Friday, I checked in on the garlic and it looks like spring with 3-4" garlic foliage poking above the insulating straw. It is one of my favorite days of the summer to pull up the first garlic bulb and crack open a fresh clove to chew on. This year's garlic stock was sourced from a Small Farm Central farmer, Honey Hill Organic Farm in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

We also had a nice response to the blog article from Joanne Rigutto who sums it up well: "My primary marketing tool is still community involvement and direct contact with potential customers."

The protagonist of last week's post, Three Springs Fruit Farm, posted an extensive comment about their experience with social networks. Ben writes about the strange world of online "friends", videos, and how MySpace fits in with their current marketing plans. Age is certainly a factor in this case, Ben writes:

Probably the only reason we started with MySpace was purely out of convenience - I decided to steer our family fruit farm toward retail February of 2007... late February, so I was already behind the eight ball a bit.  I knew it'd make sense for our farm to have a presence on the web to interact with our customers and being a 22 year old kid coming out of college, I had a familiarity with MySpace and to me, it was a free and functioning website for us in a pinch.

Food is a physical act; plants and animals raised on a patch of soil, harvested, and then eaten by the customer -- there's nothing virtual about that. In this way, the connections that local food makes can never be supplanted by the the virtual. With this dichotomy in mind, it will be interesting to see how farmers co-opt these virtual networks to the physical act of growing food.

Keep me updated if you find a way to make one of these networks work for your farm.