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 set it on the end of Aunt Pam. I'll take the liberty to call her Aunt Pam's marketing workshop. And I will reiterate a few things that she mentioned, that good points that she made. I'm particularly covering farmers market and local wholesale. We've been market gardening For as long as we've been married, plus 3 years or so before that?

So yeah, it's been 20, 20, about 11, 12 years now. So I'll just be 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 the Lord's grace somehow. So as Aunt Pam was saying, the first principle of good market gardening is having a good product. In the factory engineering world they would call this to pull not push.

Basically grow what you need and grow a good quality product. Grow something that somebody wants to buy. I was going to have a slide show with 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 why would Why would you go shop at a farmer's market or join a local CSA? Anybody here ever shopped at a farmer's market?

Quality. You do it because you want, that's 1 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 principle.

So if you are new to gardening, you know, first, 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 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 farmer's market. Now as a Seventh-day Adventist, you may have noted that most farmers markets are on Saturdays. So this is the big problem with farmers market as 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 would, you know, sell a hundred or 2 dollars in 4 hours or so my first year. But there was 1 couple that were serious market gardeners and they their their primary business was the 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 what they do.

But I just was copying the stand right next to me. And eventually, we were probably 1 of the larger vendors at that market before we quit going. 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 farmers market. And after my stand was up and running fairly well, 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 learn 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 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 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 radicchio, 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 any. I tried selling them to my customers in Bristow, small-town Oklahoma, and they never seen these things.

They never, they don't want any bitter lettuce. So, but it's what people grew up with, that's what they want. So just get to know your market. The other reason people will shop at a farmers market or join a CSA is you can get Superior quality because it's local it's harvested fresh. There are 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 3 times as good. And you know you're not going to 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 3 times as good and people will pay 3 times or more as much for them. So that's what you need to focus on.

Things that are going to 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 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 kohlrabi was, and I still get a trickle of customers that don't know what kohlrabi is.

Or Japanese white salad turnips, a variety that Johnny sells called haikarai, really excellent. They're farmers market standards, but people that have never been to a farmers market might have never eaten them because 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 in farmers market of farm stand for 10 years now like all the local food shoppers in Bristow really love kohlrabi and Japanese salad turnips when they had never seen them or heard of them 5 years ago. So you can introduce new things to a market.

Just don't put everything exotic. People want to buy their staples every week. Let me say something really quick on this topic. I was the 1 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 has this vegetable been 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 1 has ever tasted 1 of those 2 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 1 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 eggplants, or at least it didn't turn brown very fast.

And I would tell people that, and we would sell out on that, just because I would 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 farming the first year. 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 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 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 2 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 3 things on it and 1 person walking by every 10 minutes, it's not much of an experience for the customer. But if you, what makes, part of what makes the farmer's market experience interesting and exciting 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 in part of what you're selling is the experience. And so, if you get too big and you are a Walmart super center 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 we've been and we 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 farmers market mostly because we had to get up so early in the morning, get everything packed. It started at 7 in the morning and it was an hour drive which means and you have to get there 30 minute hour ahead which meant leaving with the trailer at 5 in the morning. So with 4 kids this is not practicable. So anyway we do afternoon evening deliveries now And since we don't go to Saturday farmers markets, we started our own farmers market. But it's just basically a 1 farmer farmer's market.

In our local town of Bristol, there's a big empty parking lot where they're used to in the old Walmart parking lot behind the Masio's and between Masio's and tractor supply. There's a big empty space. So I 10 years ago I just went and talked to the Masio's 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, 5 to 6.

And we're just there for 1 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 1 hour space. And which is a bustling little market for 1 hour. And it attracts a crowd of people driving by, they see 20-15 people out there at a time bustling around a couple market tents, and more people come. But that's basically the basis of our business model, is doing a CSA delivery in conjunction with the farm stand. Here's a few pictures of our farm stand.

We try to stack a 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 we start getting them all sold and then it tapers down at the end. So we typically set up our farm stand in an L shape and 1 side of it is our CSA customer service line, and the other side is for our drive up, walk up customers. And 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, 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 side all at the same time. And I just want to say this spring, I'd mentioned in the last seminar that we changed things to drive-thru for a couple of months. And it was pretty crazy, but 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 1 day, 1 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 want to 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 would have 2 or 3 people bagging vegetables as fast as we could. But there was still 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 2 bunches of root veggies, take 3 bunches of green veggies, choose a bag or a head of lettuce, or these kind of things. So we like to divide things up into general categories. With experience you can get to know kind of about what balance of things your group of people will want.

Our CSA, so our CSA members don't get pre-bagged, pre-boxed veggies. They go and pick them 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 back-end work for you, but we just get paid for our work. So it's an easier delivery, but more work before. This 1, we're working really hard while we're at the stand and bustling around a lot.

We found, we 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 of the lettuce. And so we're directing people, you can have 1 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 seem to really like that.

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Market Stands and Local Wholesales

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Better Photos for Your Farm

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