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market-farming - Re: Advertising

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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: "Rick Williams" <mrfarm AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Advertising
  • Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 09:02:51 -0500



> Talk to me about a market that can afford $16K for a season's newspaper
> advertising! Where is it? How many vendors? What are individual and
> collective stall fees? What volume of sales to vendors expect? Our
> seasonal advertising budgets are generally $1K or less.

This must be quite a large market. We pay a fee of $25/year for a space at
our small local farmer's market. I doubt that the group takes in a whole lot
more than maybe $500 to $600? We are about 35 miles from a larger
population area of about 100,000 but they have at least 3 markets in their
communities so we do not draw from very far.

Besides that, if we are really going to be local and provide sustainable
agriculture, once you start shipping your product more than a few miles, the
efficiency of local distribution is decreased to below the efficiency (and
environmental cost) of the normal distribution channels. Not to mention
having customers coming long distances which is the opposite of sustainable
agricultural distribution.

So each community is going to have to draw upon their local base of
potential customers and make it appealing to them to buy at the market. But
I wonder how effective advertising really is. I never paid any attention to
commecial advertising at all. Word of mouth and actually seeing the market
in action seems like the biggest draws.

> Elsewhere, do vigorous markets depend on homegrown tomatoes?

We are at the peak of tomato production at the moment here in SW Wisconsin.
Until frost hits. That could be next week or maybe a month away yet:)
Everybody has tomatoes and some do sell. But since they are so ubiquitous
now, I don't think any one vendor sells that many. At the market yesterday,
some of the marketers brought boxes of tomatoes but they did not sell. We
sold about 10 pints of cherry tomatoes. No one bought any of our big slicing
tomatoes at all. Not one.

Sometimes we take things for granted I suppose. From our perspective, there
is almost nothing as wonderful as a farm ripened perfect tomato. And now we
even have "Sugar Suns" and similar sweet cherry tomatoes. One thing that
does surprise me are the number of folks who don't even like to eat
tomatoes.

We did sell all our muskmellons which were of the "Roadside" cultivar and
were the largest and best we have ever grown. Only had a dozen though. We
had free samples available and we know that was very effective in getting
sales. Our Iroquois muskmellons that are coming on line are pretty bad in
comparison. Just not sweet enough.

Sincerely,

Rick Williams
Misty Ridge Farm
Dairy heifers and dairy beef graziers
Viroqua, WI

www.mistyridgefarm.com





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