Market Farming

["Krystle Chung" <learning AT selfmadefarmer.com>]

"
I'd love to see an example of a profitable small farm that I could
emulate....are there people who can make a living farming/market
gardening? The numbers just don't crunch for me."

Lynn - Check out this publication:

Grower to Grower: Creating a livelihood on a fresh market vegetable farm
By John Hendrickson, University of Wisconsin
PDF: http://www.cias.wisc.edu/pdf/grwr2grwr.pdf

I had the same question and this study offers a lot of numbers and insights. It was especially interesting to see how the scale of the farm influenced the farmer's dollars-per-hour. There are also valuable appendices with lists of equipment that might be needed by farms of various sizes and how much they cost then. Check it out. Hope this helps.

Krystle
Salem, OR
http://www.selfmadefarmer.com

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 7:18 AM, Debbie Moore <caverdjmoore AT hotmail.com> wrote:

> How do you convince people to pay more?

Hi Lynn -

The short answer is that you can't. I understand your local economy. Only 20% of my income came from our *local* farmers market last year. Two tricks to earning a profit: sell where the money is, and upscale the products. I am fortunate to live 1.5 hours from metropolitan areas. May sound like a lot but they enjoy the "small family farm" stories and will pay for it. I have learned from my husband (who is in sales professionally) to sell the STORY. Sales is extremely difficult for me, as is driving in traffic, but it's that or go back to the corporate cubicle which was slowly killing me.

I guess what I'm suggesting is can you supplement with sales in a more affluent area? When I have the opportunity to travel with my husband, we always go to farmers markets. The larger the city, the further the farmers travel, and it is not unusual to find farmers traveling 3 hours one way. They make decent profits, even with the high price of gas, and the high booth rental. Can you sell through the internet? Even if your passion is eggs and veggies, is there something you can add that you can market over the internet, or wholesale via shipping to stores somewhere etc? This does take time to develop...

Very rural cultures such as yours are very set in their ways. There is not a lot of money to go around and quality food will never be high on the list.

Deb
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