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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: [market farming] Marketing a Farm
  • Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 21:13:10 EDT


I'm having some very interesting reactions to my recent decision and announcement that from now on I'm goign to sell only to people who take out an annual $25 "Farm Membership".

At first people are taken aback, but when I remind them that this is the way Sam's Club works and the way the Country Club works, it isn't a new idea with me and I can't live on lip-service support, I need to have people start putting their money where their mouth is if I'm going to stay in business, they're signing right up!!!!

Now, not everybody is taking on the $100 commitment for my subscription garden (CSA). That's okay, it was never my intention to try to feed the whole world even with bio-intnsive techniques. My job is to improve this hardscrabble played-out soil -- any harvest that comes off it is a nice side benefit. Not a typical farm plan, I admit, but it works for me.

I can schlep my surplus produce to the farmers market and spend the whole day getting sunstroke, or I can donate my surplus produce to the Food Bank and receive tax-deductible donation receipts that I can apply against the income from my full-time job maintained to support the farm, I can compost it, I can put a few feeder pigs to work tilling up new garden areas and getting fat on the extra good food. If I'm going to cast my pearls before swine I should at least get proscuitto.

A farm, especially an organic farm with maintained hiking trails and educational programs, provides more to a community than just the food it grows. And the connection to a real farm is something that many people -- not all, but many -- are willing to pay for.

Just thought I'd toss this in as a side note to the discussion, especially since it relates so clearly to the idea of "competing" with the superstores -- whenever we're farm marketing, we're marketing our farms and we shouldn't see that so much as a challenge but as a golden opportunity!

It's all in the numbers. There are a million people within 50 miles of me. If just one out of every thousand families becomes a member of my farm, that's $25 x .001 x 1,000,000 = $25,000 before I've ever sold a single zucchini. If one out of a hundred joins, we'll have Knott's Berry Farm here before we know it and I'll have to move because that's too civilized for my simple tastes. <G>

Hey, a girl can dream. My point is, we have more to offer -- and more to sell -- than just produce.

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
Corning, NY
http://www.ic.org/agrove



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