marketing

I have worked farmers markets. I have gotten up at dawn to pick, clean, and pack produce. I have started the drive to the farmers market in the mid-afternoon sun, set up a stand that highlights the abundance of a farm in the summertime, sold produce for several hours, packed the truck, driven back to the farm, unloaded after dark and to bed.

I understand how exciting markets are, but I also understand the work that goes into them. That is why Small Farm Central is helping farmers streamline the ordering process and increase sales at their markets.

We are offering a new stand-alone service (or in conjunction with a full website) that allows you to pre-sell your farmers market products online. Again, you do not need have a regular Small Farm Central website to take advantage of this service.

Some customers just want "easy"

There are many customers who come to a market to socialize with friends, take a walk with the kids, and interact with many different farmers and vendors. These are the types of people that make farmers markets one of the vibrant expressions of community that we have in small towns. These people are not in the market for online ordering.

On the other hand, there are always customers who rush out of work as soon as possible to get to the market only to be disappointed by the quality of products that are left near the end of the market and may or may not complain to you. It is likely that they don't come back to your stand or the market.

For these people, the possibility of ordering online a day or two before the market makes a lot of sense. These are working people who are online most of the day and can take a few minutes at lunch to place an order and will be very excited to think that they have a box waiting for them at the market when they get there late. This type of customer will be likely to order their whole week of food from your farm instead of shopping around because you have made it so easy. If you could get 20-30 of these customers to make a $20-30 purchase on your site as a pre-sale each week, you have $400-900 in extra sales each week.

Easy on you too

Like the rest of the Small Farm Central system, the farmers market pre-sales component is designed for use by farmers without technical knowledge. Create the items you want to sell, list the inventory you have available, and your store is ready to go.

Many farms will have a window that the online store is open. If your market is on Thursday evening, perhaps you list your inventory and open the store at 8am on Monday morning. When the store is open, you will send out a mass email to your customers telling them the store is open for orders. The store will stay open until 6am on Thursday when you click one button in the control panel to disable access to the page.

Then you can create a report that lists all the sales made from Monday at 8am to Thursday at 6am. One feature of the reporting capability is that in additional to listing individual orders, it also lists an aggregate total of items that were ordered, so you can see how many bunches of kale or pounds of ground beef were requested in all of the orders. This report will help you easily plan for picking and packing the truck.

For more detailed info see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders-details

Payment processing

Once the customer has created an order, you still need to get payed.

You have the choice of sending the customer through a credit card processor (we use an easy to set-up service called Google Checkout) or having the user create an account with their contact information. If you choose the second option, the customer can come back the next week and just type in their user name and password so they do not have to re-enter contact information. This helps you identify particular customers and track them over time. Using the second option also has the advantage of saving the 2% of sales that the payment processor will take.

One feature that will aid some farmers in payment processing is the ability to have "private store" pages, which are only accessible by certain types of users. A farmer may have a committed group of customers (this works really well for restaurants and CSA sales, but could also apply to farmers markets): they can limit a particular ecommerce page for access only by users within a particular group. This has the potential to eliminate the payment processing fees, but also limits orders to trusted customers, so there are not any fraudulent orders.

The possibilities!

Online pre-ordering is not a new concept -- many farms have been running an email list with products for sale and working responses into an Excel spreadsheet. The difference here is that a little technology makes this process much less time-consuming for the farmer and enticing to the customer.

What if you had a few hundred dollars in sales in your pocket before you started picking, packing, and driving?

Getting started..

Currently we have a special going to get you started with farmers market pre-ordering this year for $185 -- this includes the new member fee and 6 months of service (normally this would cost $220). For each month that you want to use the service beyond that, it is $20/month. You only pay when you are using the service, so you can let the service lapse in the wintertime and restart it for the 2009 season without payment of the new member fee again.

If you are ready to get started:
http://smallfarmcentral.com/buynow

If you want some more information on farmers market presales and ordering see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders-details
Farm ecommerce brings direct, local sales to farms

I hope everyone is having a productive Spring. I know you are busy preparing the fields, fixing machinery and planting, but I really think online pre-selling is one way to vastly improve your marketing this year without breaking your rhythm in the fields.

SPIN-Farming™ Teams Up with Small Farm Central

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SPIN-Farming, (www.spinfarming.com) has teamed up with Small Farm Central (www.smallfarmcentral.com) to provide ready-to-go websites that connect farmers with customers quickly, easily and inexpensively.

“SPIN-Farming calls for cultivating customers as well as crops, and that calls for a professional-looking web site,” says Wally Satzewich, the developer of the SPIN-Farming system. “But most farmers would rather deal with buggy potato plants than buggy software. Small Farm Central frees farmers to be out working their plots instead of sitting behind a computer trying to program their web sites.”

The SPIN-branded web sites can include everything “soup to nuts”, from photo galleries to blogs to recipes to mailing lists, but farmers can start out simply and add features as they see the need. No technical experience is necessary to run their sites on Small Farm Central.

“SPIN-Farming is helping to eliminate the traditional hardships of farming and is redefining it as an entrepreneurially-driven profession,” says Roxanne Christensen, Co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series. “It is only natural to be working with Small Farm Central to eliminate the complexities of web site development and help farmers harness the power of technology for direct marketing. Plus, Small Farm Central is in a great position to know what is working for farmers online, and they generously offer free tips and advice at their site.”

“Whether they farm in the middle of an urban jungle, on the suburban fringe, or as part of a large acreage in the country, each SPIN farmer’s story is a powerful online marketing tool. We at Small Farm Central understand their stories, and help them tell it, engage with their customers, and sell more through professional, active websites that promote the farmer-eater connection,” says Simon Huntley, Lead Developer of Small Farm Central.

ABOUT SPIN-FARMING

S-mall P-lot IN-tensive (SPIN) Farming is a non-technical, easy-to-understand-and inexpensive-to-implement farming system that makes it possible to generate $50,000+ in gross sales from a half-acre by growing common vegetables. It is organic-based and can be practiced on a single plot or multi-sited on several residential backyards or front lawns in urban or peri-urban areas. It is available via an online learning series at www.spinfarming.com.

ABOUT SMALL FARM CENTRAL

Small Farm Central provides inexpensive, professional web services to farmers across the country. An online control panel that farmers can access at any time takes the mystery out of farm websites and makes it a breeze to sell products, publish a blog, post photos, and more. Information about the Small Farm Central SPIN web service can be found at: http://smallfarmcentral.com/spin/welcome.

Contact:
SPIN-Farming
Roxanne Christensen
e-mail: rchristensen@infocommercegroup.com
phone: 610-505-9189

This a great pep talk from Joel Salatin on the value of creating relationships with customers. This comes from the December 2007 issue of Acres USA magazine.

...farmers should be building relationships with customers. It’s a crying shame that farmers by and large distrust their customers. Farmers are rightfully dubious about the intentions of the grain elevator, sale barn or large processor/buyer. Rather than building a customer relationship, however, farmers feel isolated from their buyers at best, and a healthy animosity at worst.

Alternative marketing offers an antidote for this buyer-seller divorce. Many relationship-oriented marketing schemes exist. From Community Supported Agriculture to farmers markets to Internet sales to farmgate sales, all of these venues and more provide opportunities for farmers to build relationships with their constituency.

The immediate feedback about product quality, product type and product quantity creates not only accountability but also immediate encouragement. How many farmers receive praise and accolades from their customers? I noticed this most poignantly when our children were small and customers would tell them what important work their family did. “We depend on you for our food,” they would say.

Do you know what that does for the self-image of a child? In a day when farm kids routinely receive redneck stereotyping from their peers — farming, after all, is not cool like Dilbert cubicles — for ours to receive constant positive reinforcement was worth more than any amount of money. We don’t farm because we’re too stupid to do anything else; we farm because we love it and want to heal the world, and all the people in it.

Honoring and respecting our customers is part and parcel of the farm business. Most farmers do not even envision themselves as part of the food chain. They just see themselves as producers of raw commodities. Period. End of story.

And that is unfortunate. It dishonors the most noble vocation on earth, and the ultimate stewardship of air, soil and water. Building customer relationships, although challenging at times, is critical to creating a farm that can sustain itself long term.

There we are: soil, plants, animals, people, community and customers. Building relationships is the calling, the sacred ministry, of good farmers. How we massage those relationships determines our success and the degree to which we heal all the elements within our sphere of influence.

Let’s go build some relationships.

You can find the full PDF here.

I especially like the idea of "immediate feedback about product quality, product type and product quantity." This farmer-to-eater relationship is probably the biggest estimator of quality. The stronger your relationship with the eater the more care you will put into the growing of food. What comprises would you make in growing food for your children versus food that goes into an airplane for a foreign country?

Do you encourage your customers to preserve? (via flickr)

There is a wonderful article in the Toronto Star about canning and preserving in the modern age. The writer argues that canning is not a dying art for "those who want to know the source of their food, control its sugar and salt content, avoid pesticides, and take advantage of farmers' markets."

I am not exactly sure how farmers can take advantage of canning as a marketing tool, but it is good to encourage customers to preserve the summer's bounty. I think there is a fine line here, because those who do not have the time or energy to preserve should not feel discouraged or like they are not doing enough. Canning is something that I like to do personally (I just put up some applesauce a few nights ago), but I know it borders on the absurd to spend seven hours making seven quarts of tomato sauce which can be bought for so cheap. I think it is important for me and a fun activity, but I would not wish it on anyone who does not have the desire to do it.

I like the idea of canning workshops on the farm. It is intimidating to can for the first time and I would have appreciated some in-person accumulated knowledge the first time I tried it. I am not sure how this can work legally due to food preparation laws, but it is something to explore and an important concept to pass on to customers who are interested. Without respect to food preparation laws, your farm could provide the produce, the jars, and the knowledge and send everyone home with labeled jars. Maybe the labels have your logo on them and a recipe for the customer to finish the job at home?

is there anything you do at your farm to promote preservation? I'd love to hear about it via email or in comments.

Some other great quotes from the article:

"...Pratt is a home canner – surprisingly, it's not a dying art – and, like many, she has given a lot of thought to the enterprise. It is more than simply putting up food from the harvest, or the back garden. Preserving is an ideology, a political act, a hands-on vote in support of local farmers and their produce. It is a way of withholding, even in small measures, from the vast corporatization of our food. And in its subtle and serene way, it is a link to the past."

"It brings back "the feeling of belonging to the family group, the sense of history and confidence in the future as we carried out these tasks year after year, the pride we took in our work, and especially the camaraderie."

(via Treehugger)

If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy:
Nine practical solutions for the consumption of home canned food

I'd love to hear from you; leave comments below.

-----------------------------------
Small Farm Central bridges the gap between technology and agriculture by providing web services to direct marketing small farms across the country. We help farms reach their marketing potential with inexpensive, professional websites that any farmer can use. Come get a free demo today.

Polyface Farm SignWe can't all be celebrity farmers, but perhaps we can learn something? ...some quotes from an article on Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm:
A New Push to Make Farming Profitable

"He credits the high quality with enabling him to build a loyal following of consumer and restaurant customers. His e-mail-based "metropolitan buying clubs" have grown to 900 families within a 100-mile radius, from just 200 families two years ago."

"The bugaboo in direct-farm-marketing is coming in from the garden and taking care of your customers," he says. "The beauty of this is it is e-mail-based and there is no middleman."

Can we feed the world and support our small farms as local food moves from fad to mainstream? I don't think anyone knows the answer for sure, but to me it sure feels right. The question is how do we support farmers and make it economically feasible for them to bring us our organic, local, sustainable food, and (insert trendy food adjective here).