[Snakeroot Organic Farm logo]
 • HOME
 • What's New Here
 • Snakeroot Poultry

THE BASICS
 • About Our Farm
 • Annual Farm Tour
 • Community Supported
    Agriculture Plan (CSA)
 •
Directions to our Farm
 • From a Run Out Hayfield to
    a Prosperous Organic Farm
    in Ten Easy Years

 • Get Real. Get Organic!
 • History of Our Farm
 • Pictures of the Farm
 • Where We Buy
 • Where We Sell
 • Our Yearly Work Schedule
 • Just Pretty
 • Subscribe to our e-newsletter.
 • Newsletter Archive.
 • What We Will & Won't Ship

OUR PEOPLE
 • Working Here
 • Our Apprentices
 • Our Farm Workers
 • Pictures of Us at Market

WHAT WE GROW
 • Fresh Vegetables
 • Fresh Fruit
 • Fresh Herbs
 • Perennials
 • Aloe - a magical plant
 • Our Bird Houses
 • Lupines
 • Rosemary Plants
 • Lovage, Tansy & Yarrow
 • Our Product Brochures
 • Dried Vegetables
 • Dried Culinary Herbs
MAPLE
 • Maple Syrup
 • Maple Syrup, p.2
 • Sugarin' Is Like Ice Fishin'
 • Our New Sugarhouse
TOMATOES
 • Tomato Seedlings
 • Tomato Seeds We Offer
 • Tomato Seed Production
 • Paste Tomatoes
GARLIC
 • About Garlic
 • Garlic for Sale
 • Garlic Year Round
 • Mulching Garlic
 • Growing Rounds from Bulbils
 • Whole Bulbil Cluster Method
 • Planting Garlic

MULCHING
 • Using Mulches
 • Combatting Quackgrass
    with Mulch

 • We Want Your Leaves!
 • In Praise of Chips

FOOD & FARMING INFO
 • Buying in Bulk for
    Storage, Canning & Freezing

 • Winter Storage Tips
 • How to Freeze Our Veggies
 • Building Techniques
 • Our Outbuildings
 • Evolution of the Farm Table
 • The Story of Our Cooler
 • Prepping Veggies for Market
 • Crop Rotations
 • Drip Irrigation
 • Low Pressure Water
 • Planting with Spreadsheets
 • Greenhouse Vegetable
    Production

 • Let-tuce Begin
 • Recipe Favorites
 • Our "Remay Roller"
 • Gardening Class Notes
 • Your Most Expensive Crop

OPINIONS & IDEAS
 • Being Green
 • Digging Potatoes by Hand
 • Farmers' Markets in 2012
 • History of Pittsfield
 • Hybrids or Open Pollinated?
 • Making Websites
 • Open Source Software

FARM TRANSITION…
    Our Retirement Plan
 • How Should a Farmer Retire?
 • Impediments to the want-to-be     farmer
 • Reducing the Value
    of the Land

 • Who Will Farm Here When
    We're Gone?

 • Apprentice Terms and Stages
 • From Apprentices to Partners
 • Transferring Farm Ownership





…and now for something completely different…

At dawn
Canoe bow waves are quickly lost
    on the shoreside
But go on out of sight
    on the lake side.

-1986


The constant swish-swish of skis
    On a day long ski.
The constant swish-swish of wiper blades
    On a day long drive.

-1990


My dog, trotting barefoot
Steps on a garden slug
And thinks
Nothing of it.

-1999


Word spreads quickly
as I approach the pond.
All becomes quiet.

-1997


Hidden in the vines
a large warted cucumber
jumps out of reach.
A toad!

-1997


Delicate puffs
of marshmallow snow
carefully perched
on a branch,
await the trigger of my hat
to melt their way down my back.

-2010
Deep in the tomato jungle
Fruits of yellow, purple and red
Tell of their readiness
To go to market.

-2010
Sugarin' Chores
Snowflakes hurry through my flashlight beam,
As my boots knead new snow with spring mud,
On my nightly Hajj to keep the boil alive,
For as long as possible until the dawn,
To match the power of the flowing sap,
With my meager evaporator and will.
The prize at the finish line are jars of syrup
And Spring.

-2013

Snakeroot Organic Farm

Overview of Our Marketing

New Farmer Training Course, Waldo Extension Office

Tuesday, 27-March-12, 6pm

In 1981, I joined a couple at a farm where we were wholesaling all of our five acres of storage crops to various co-op retailers and to Johnny's Selected Seeds. This consisted of carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, beets, daikon, onions, leeks, winter squashes, and seed shallots. Since one of the original partners preferred a macrobiotic diet, we did not grow potatoes.

For the most part, the system worked well for us: we were actually supporting ourselves by farming! We planted from April to June, harvested from August to October, and sold from September through March, making weekly or bi-weekly deliveries ourselves. However, the cash flow was terrible, requiring us to obtain a business loan every year to support the operation from April to September, when we would finally begin to get paid for our deliveries.

In 1982 we began planting a small part of our gardens to summer harvested crops and attending a farmers' market. This worked so well that we expanded the summer crops the following year and began attending a second farmers' market. We were delighted that, unlike selling to a retailer when you often get paid several weeks after delivery, we got paid in cash every day we went to market. And we got paid retail prices, to boot! In each of the following years we expanded the summer gardens while continuing to grow storage crops for fall and winter deliveries. By 1990 retailing at farmers' markets made up over two thirds of our income, we had expanded to ten acres under cultivation, and were declining market opportunities because we simply couldn't produce enough and still maintain the small farm lifestyle we were living.

In 1990, my wife Lois joined the farm, and a few years later the original couple split up, so Lois and I moved to a run-out hayfield on the Snakeroot Road in Pittsfield to begin our own farm on. We immediately focused on attending farmers' markets, starting one in Pittsfield in 1997 and in Unity in 1999.

Today we attend those markets plus farmers' markets in Orono, Waterville and Newport, which means at the height of the summer we are going to a total of seven markets five days a week. This of course requires that we hire local folks to work with us on the farm, and we offer them the opportunity to train for going to market for us.

Our strategy for our marketing has two main branches: product strategies and customer strategies.

Product strategies involve providing a wide range of garden seedlings and quality produce, consistently week to week, and over as long a season as possible. We are MOFGA certified organic, and we display this at market. Over our 15 years of growing at Snakeroot, we have expanded our selling season from May into April and March, and from October into November. We have developed storage techniques, greenhouse growing methods, and in-field overwintering techniques that allow us to bring produce to market early in the season before most folks have even started their gardens. We bring frost sensitive crops to fall markets weeks after the local gardens have been frosted. However, we do value our “down time” to recuperate during the winter, so we intentionally do not sell year-round.

However, too often we see producers of quality products at market who seem to believe that offering a good product is all that there is to marketing. We believe this is a big mistake, so we also have . . .

Customer strategies involve trying our best to make shoppers feel a true sense of hospitality at our stand at the markets we attend. We do this by using low- and no-pressure selling techniques; by giving gardening advice in any degree of detail a person is willing to listen to; by presenting attractive, colorful and well-labeled displays that are a joy to behold; and by always showing shoppers that we are happy to be there. As a result, shoppers often stop by our stand even on rainy, cold and snowy days to buy the freshest in locally grown high quality organic produce, and even if our hands are so cold we can barely make change, we smile and joke with them as they make their purchases. Because we really do enjoy what we are doing.

Today at Snakeroot Organic Farm, approximately 90% of our produce is sold at farmers' markets directly to the folks who will be having it for dinner that week. The rest is sold to a few other growers, a few locally owned retailers, and through the mail via internet orders. We've been consistently grossing over $100,000 on 5 acres for the past several years.


27 Organic Farm Road, Pittsfield Maine 04967
http://www.snakeroot.net/farm
owned and operated by
Tom Roberts & Lois Labbe
Tom: Tom@snakeroot.net (cell) 207-416-5417
or
Lois: Lois@snakeroot.net (cell) 207-416-5418

Gardening for the public since 1995.



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