farm marketing

Show customers a side of your farm they never see.
As the weather turns fall-like here in Pennsylvania, I've been thinking about how important the next six months are for a farm's marketing approach. You have spent all summer nurturing a strong, consistent customer base and you have formed rapport with each loyal customer. Now they are facing a winter back at the supermarket and they might feel a little lost. I remember customers at the CSA I helped run in western Colorado feeling a little betrayed at the end of season -- especially for the ones that were first discovering "real" food. They felt abandoned.

You won't see that customer for the next six months in person, but you need to make sure that your farm is in their thoughts. When it is Spring-time again, you want them to be excited for the first greens and the first farmer's market -- you want to count on their support again next year. An internet marketing approach with regular email newsletters and a dynamic, well-tended farm website will keep customers engaged and even more loyal next year because they will know about the long months of preparation it takes to bring that cage-free, local egg or ripe heirloom tomato to the market in the summertime.

I know it is a tired time of year and the freeze is sometimes welcomed because it assuages your guilt at leaving the rest of those peppers rotting in the field. At this point in the year, you probably feel like just getting away from the farm and doing anything else. But when you get back from that break, keep in touch with your customers. You did collect email addresses this summer didn't you?

Keep up the rapport: customers will love to hear what the farm looks like and feels like during the winter. What do you do on those coldest days of winter? Do you have big plans for next year? Take winter communication as a chance to clear your mind and write down what you are feeling about the farm -- the future and the successes of last season. It is a great exercise to explain these thoughts to customers because you will often uncover some insights that you didn't quite fully grasp before.

I do the same thing here a few times a week!

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Farm marketing requires telling a compelling story about the food you produce.Organic and other stripes of sustainable farmers have long contested that their foods are healthier than food produced through the conventional food system. I know that many Small Farm Central members and readers are not organically certified, but all of you are producing food that you are proud of and simply because you have to look the customer in the eye when you sell the food, your products are likely raised with much more care than the larger farms.

In marketing your crops and your farm to customers you should make them feel good about supporting your farm because it is a worthy venture, which is a topic that I cover often here at Small Farm Central. Customers can also be motivated by the healthful aspects of your products. As a culture we are already starting to remember the falsity in statements like: "an eggplant is an eggplant is an eggplant." This is made very obvious in the varieties bred for taste that local, small farmers choose to produce. There is now a growing amount of evidence that there is a nutritional difference as well.

In a New York Times article, Harold McGee refers to the work of 40 Swiss rats and their scientist overseers:

As an “integrative method” for assessing quality, they gave lab animals a choice of biscuits made from organic or conventional wheat. The rats ate significantly more of the former. The authors call this result remarkable, because they found the two wheats to be very similar in chemical composition and baking performance.

The scientists are unsure of exactly why the rats choose the organic wheat, but the current theory settles around phytochemical levels:

...plants in organic production are unprotected by pesticides and fungicides, they are more stressed by insects and disease microbes than conventional crops, and have to work harder to protect themselves. So it makes sense that organic produce would have more intense flavors...

Plants sense and respond to any kind of attack by means of chemical signals. Cells in the attacked area first detect telltale molecules from the invader. Then they respond by releasing warning molecules that trigger the rest of the plant — and even neighboring plants — to start producing chemical defenses. Biologists discovered many years ago that they could induce the plant’s defensive response without any live insect or fungus. All they had to do was supply the initial chemical signals — the invader molecules or the plant’s warning chemicals.

McGee goes on to suggest ways you can induce this reaction in your backyard garden. It is worth noting that in blind taste tests people could not distinguish between organic and conventional produce. This is not a problem for local produce of course: we have all the advantages. If the taste test could be between a conventionally grown food and food that was grown on a local farm the results would be much different. You can let the food come to full ripeness; grow varieties bred for taste instead of shipping; and only ship the food a few miles instead of a few thousand miles.

The pytochemical explanation and the anecdote about 40 Swiss rats choosing sustainably raised food is a powerful story to tell your customers and one that will stick in their mind. Maybe next time the choice is between the supermarket and your farm, they will stop by your farm instead.

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Rancho Gordo holds the beans.I talked with Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo last week about his web marketing strategy and how it drives his business. I introduced Steve in a post last week, so I won't rehash the introduction too much. Steve travels Mexico and Central America in search of rare and unusual dried beans. He brings them back to his farm in Napa, California to test and then brings only the tastiest varieties to markets, restaurants, and his Internet store. Since I focus on web marketing issues here at Small Farm Central, I talked to him about his blog and how it relates to his marketing and overall business.

When did you start the Rancho Gordo blog and why?

I started the blog in November of 2006 and I am not really sure how or why it continued. I guess I just had a creative itch and I felt like I had something to say and the blog went from there. It was intuitive for me, so I did it. If it doesn't make sense to you, don't do it. I started out posting sporadically and lately I have settled on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. I sit down one afternoon every two weeks and just start writing. I shut out the world and good things happen. If I interrupted myself every two or three days to write the blog, I think that would be disruptive. I am passionate about food, so I write about beans and the subjects that interest me; it would be very difficult and boring for me to write about computer parts, for example.

What is the best part about running a blog?

You control the story. I have had several newspaper articles done about the farm and the reporter always gets something wrong. With my blog, I write it exactly how I want it and then the public reads my story. Earlier this year I posted some blog articles about a disagreement I had with Slow Foods. I was able to tell my story as I saw it and continue posting as more information became available. This series of articles eventually led to the blog and this disagreement being mentioned twice in the San Francisco Chronicle. Business went way up and has stayed there since.

Who reads your blog?

I get about 300-500 unique visitors to the site each day. This is mostly a local phenomenon, but people from all over the country read it too. Most of the time I think no one is reading the blog and then someone comes up to me at a farmer's market and tells me that they love a recipe or they really supported me in the Slow Foods incident and that makes me feel like my voice is being heard. I've noticed that the longer I do this that my blog shows up in the search results more often for all kinds of things, so I just focus on content and let the rest fall into place. Over the years, I have built a mailing list of 3,000 email addresses which helps get the word out about the blog and my business.

Great blog photography. How does your e-commerce work?

I run my web store through dotcomdesigners.com, I believe it costs about $50/month and then the extra 2% or so of sales that goes directly to the credit card company. I used to sell through Local Harvest's online store and just tack on an extra dollar to each bag to account for the fee. This was good just to check things out because there is no investment, but I wanted more control over the look of the e-store.

How does the revenue split for your farm between farmer's markets, restaurants, and Internet sales?

It is in thirds. The market share of sales has been declining while the Internet sales are going up. I'm lucky to sell a value-added product that ships really well; this is ideal for Internet sales. I think all farms should be producing something that is value added if only to sell in the off-season. The added benefit is these items can ship and you can get a market on the Internet. I also make a little money on the Amazon affiliate program; about $30/quarter. Basically it allows me to advertise relevant books and music and I get a little take of any sale that Amazon makes from my links. More than anything, this helps me connect with people who have read the same book I have. It validates me with certain people. In the future, I am going to review books and then put a link to the amazon site at the bottom of the post.

Do you have any other advice to give farmers who are considering blogging or a website?

Make time to do this - a website that is only updated once every three months is boring. If you can't make the time to update regularly, don't do it. Recipes are a really big driver of my sales. Each time I post a recipe for one of my beans, I can see that bean take off in sales. So be passionate about what you are selling, tell people how to use it and be specific. People don't know how to cook anymore. I'll post a recipe that says a dash of this and a handful of this and people want know exactly how many tablespoons or cups of each ingredient, so I'm going to post the general idea of what to do with a recipe and then put some absolute numbers to that in the future. Stay focused -- pick your topic and write about it but don't stray into your personal affairs too much if this is meant to be your small business blog.

Thanks to Steve Sando for allowing me to interview him. Check out his website and blog at:
Rancho Gordo

The latest news is that the spat with Slow Foods got Steve a book deal. He is currently putting the finishing touches on Heirloom Beans: Recipes from Rancho Gordo. Hopefully we'll hear more from Steve in the future because I think he is a great example to any farmers looking to branch out into online marketing successfully.

See also:
Rancho Gordo does farm marketing the right way