New Farmer Training Course, Waldo Extension Office
Tuesday, 27-March-2012, 6pm
by Tom Roberts
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 \u201cdown time\u201d 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, or 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.
