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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] marketing
  • Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2006 10:49:25 EDT

Got way behind on my reading of this list, and more's the pity because the
threads have been good.

Having read all the Marketing and Farmer's Market posts to see if the major
points were covered, they were, but if I could add a bit of another way of
saying some of the same things:

This year we are selling nearly nothing off the farm (farm produce-wise)
winding down some five to six years dabbling in it. We've incidentally sold
some
laying chickens, rabbits, and goats this year, but we didn't initiate the
sale, didn't 'market' them. I'm thinking that training horses wouldn't
count
for this thread. So our gardens and flocks have eased their way back down to
subsistence level.

In our heyday, we frequented the farmer's market with produce, honey, eggs,
bread, flowers, soap, beeswax candles, and a lot of other things. The
politics
of the farmers' market was the pits so the second year and subsequent years,
we kept an email list took orders by email and delivered. That was much
better, but marginal still as I will explain later.

To put this into persepective, we never put ourselves in a position to depend
on marketing farmstead products to stay afloat. It was a sideline at best
and we set up a sort of set of books in a 'free food' program where we wanted
to
supply all our food but not expend any cash at all doing so. Selling things
from the farm was only intended to cover the expense of the greenhouses, a
little supplemental feed (when we had too many chickens), farrier costs,
seeds,
fuel to haul manure and organic material from off farm, fencing, etc .....
and
to buy our bulk items we didn't grow like cooking oil and wheat (although we
are growing wheat this year). We weren't trying to pay a mortgage and not
even
the taxes and insurance with it, so like Gandi said when an interviewer was
amazed he could weave the cloth for his own clothes, he said "Well, I only
wear
a loincloth so for me it is not a very big accomplishment."

We've always viewed the farm as a 'Render unto Caesar' operation and
separated out in our thinking the subsistence aspect of what it produces and
the other
modern expenses. Mixing those two metaphors has not been satisfactory for
us. It is much easier to work a few hours off farm or produce some
marketable
item in our shop to pay for electricity, tools, insurance, dental visits,
taxes, and such than to grow enough turnips to feed us AND sell enough for
the cash
to pay for those things.

It's a difficult concept to convey, and I know I'm not doing an dequate job
of it. I can usually do nothing but wag my head at those who can't
understand
the concept and think it's some sort of advocacy for "pure homesteading" so
some such. So let me make it even worse by continuing: We can cut enough
wood
for our heating needs with only a modicum of effort. It's close by, we can
cut it and gather it and stack it at our leisure (at least on our schedule).
But if we tried to earn cash by selling firewood, the stakes are raised
considerably (hmmmm, seems like there ought to be a pun in there somewhere).
We need
much more wood, we have to haul it so there are truck expenses, we have to
intermesh with other people's schedules, we have to market it. The biggest
shift in the paradigm is that we are able to get all our own heating and
cooking
wood with hand tools. Can't possilby do a firewood trade without chainsaws
and
such so there are those expenses and annoyances as well. What if we decided
to pursue a firewood trade and use the money to run a heat pump?? We would
work many, many times as hard as we would just gathering the fuel and burning
it
ourselves. In fact, we could go to the local convenience store and work an
easy shift a week and get our fuel costs with a lot less effort.

We found marketing farm produce to be much the same in the end. It is
astounding to me how little space it takes to supply all the food needs for a
family
of six, and some of those six have vastly expanding appetites! We can
maintain plenty large enough gardens with a generous margin of hedging our
bets,
fowl, goats, cow, rabbits, bees, orchards and vinyards on a very small
percent of
the truck available to us. And since the place is being used below capacity,
input of feed and organic material form outside the farm is minimal to
non-existent.

BUT the moment we stepped over the line to offer things for cash, the effort
began to rise expodentially.

I read the comments and advice here about this or that marketing ploy,
finding the highly motivated customer base, value added, promote the healthy
aspect,
etc. To that I say, try it for a few seasons and let us know how it works
for you. The reality in the trenches for us was more like this: The
customers
are fickle in the extreme. There is not such thing as that group of
wonderful
customers who buy your produce on a regular basis. They come and go.

Lynn has mentioned the problems of raising the price of eggs from $1.25 a
dozen to $1.50. We sold eggs for several years at $2.00/dozen. One week
we'd
sell every egg we had and had people highly annoyed that they didn't get any.

The next week we'd have 20 dozen ready to sell and no one wanted them.
Couldn't give them away. Next week the chickens would begin the moult and
the egg
count would drop, "Where's my damn eggs!!" is what we'd hear.

The most profitable thing was salads which we sold from $4 to $6 for a half
pound bag (depending on what was in it). Of course, the salad plots had to
be
replanted continuously depending on what you thought the demand would be in a
few weeks. "Love the salads, can't get enough, oh, you're out? so
disappointed!" So we planted more. As the lettuce and mizuma and tsa-toi got
sizeable,
then mature, then over-mature and became rabbit food, we heard "None this
week, thanks." So we planted less, and when these plots came ready to
harvest, it
was "What? Out? I was really depending on getting some from you!"

All the models for homestead produce marketing look so good on paper. So I
began to look around my area for more successful models to follow, someone
who
was marketing on a regular basis and turning a credible profit at it. What I
found was that all operations who claimed to be doing that were being
supported by some sort of grant, they weren't making it on their own at all.
Our own
local farmers market supported by the city and state and a few federal grants
had as many as 25 to 30 farmers at the peak of the season (which is not very
long) and the most prolific were making about $3000 for the season, with the
average being about $1000. But the market was supported by over $180,000 in
grant money! It's like trying to heat your house with sodden leaves which
you
can do so long as you have enough gas or coal to burn them with!

I too heard all the stories about "Happy Gizzard" farm or some such that was
held up as a model of success for organic specialty marketing on a small farm
basis. But whenever I looked into those closely enough, there was other
money
floating the operation so that it really mattered little whether they sold
anything or not.


Yet, none the less, we turned a profit for our effort. We abandoned the
farmers market as a rum start and did a subscription business (I've never
found an
actual, *honest* CSA that has made it on it's own without grant supplements).
We only offered what we actually had, a la carte, as it were. Finally,
though, fuel prices brought that to a halt. And the notion of putting a few
buckets of salad oil in a diesel truck falls into the same sort of
speculation as
those perfect, golden produce customers.

Having been there and done that, I am stuck by the difference in the effort
and worry of making an item in my shop and selling it on eBay for the same
money it woudl take me six weeks to earn selling farm produce. But much more
than
this, I am mindful of the difference in the effort of putting overflowing
abundance on the table from the garden and pastures, and the effort of
earning
even a little cash by selling same.

I'm not attempting to offer a satisfactory explanation of it, but it seems in
my experience that the lightest and most effortless thing eaten directly on
the farm takes on leaden shoes when it walks past our gate.

James




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