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The Farming Student Has Become the Master w/ Chucktown Acres
336 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we discuss career changes, regenerative Farming, and business growth with Alex Russell of Chucktown Acres. Alex started his journey in Farming as an intern at Polyface Farm with absolutely no Farming knowledge, and later went on to start his own Farm. Chucktown Acres is a working, regenerative farm just outside of Charleston, SC that aims to produce an elite quality of food and educate on the importance of soil health.
https://www.chucktownacres.com/
https://barn2door.com/resources
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Transcript
Introduction: Farm Success Levers
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price, and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers, save time, and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to the direct farm podcast.
Meet Alex Russell from Chucktown Acres
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm Rory, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our newest farm advisors, Alex Russell of Chucktown acres located in McClellanville, South Carolina. Welcome Alex. Great to have you here. Thanks Rory. Pleasure to be here, my friend. Yeah. Could you maybe start out by telling us a little bit about Chucktown acres and what you produce there?
00:00:49
Speaker
Yep, absolutely. So we are a regenerative farm just outside of Charleston, South Carolina. We do grass fed beef, forest raised pork, pasture raised chicken and eggs. We also do a little bit of some stuff on the side, Thanksgiving turkeys. We do a strawberry you pick in the spring, tons of field trips and farm tours and stuff like that too. And yeah, we stay pretty busy.
00:01:14
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Who all is working on the farm and helping you with that? Or is it just you?
Farm Operations and Key Players
00:01:19
Speaker
I've got a helper. His name is Matt. He is my right hand man. And he's here four days a week. And so he helps with a huge bulk of the farm labor. And it's really nice just to have at least a solid guy who knows how to use a drill and a chainsaw and fix electric stuff and plumbing stuff.
00:01:44
Speaker
Someone who's handy because that really frees me up to be able to do farming and all the business side of the farming. And that's been something that I didn't realize was going to take so much of my time getting into farming. I didn't realize it's been half my time with my computer and certain emails and working with the software like Barnador. And so.
00:02:09
Speaker
to me and him for the most part right now. And we're able to, we're able to maintain what we've got with just the two of us and be able to stay on top of things right now. But as we continue to grow as a business, we're only in our third year right now. So as we continue to grow, we're going to have to keep hiring help, but that's what we've got for now. Matt and I running the show.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. You said computer stuff, probably not the reason you got into farming. What were you doing before farming and how did you end up choosing to farm?
From Bible College to Farming Passion
00:02:44
Speaker
Oh, that's a long story. I'll try to keep it brief. So I went to a Bible college out in Kansas city. I was on a mission to try and find out what people need the most. And so at this time,
00:03:00
Speaker
I thought people need good leadership. People need somebody who's going to take care of them. So I wanted to be training to be a pastor at a church while I was in the middle of Bible college. I read a book from a guy named Joel Salatin. My mentor at the time actually gave me this book. They were really into farming for some reason. And I didn't really understand like, why do you guys care about farms? They bought all their meat from a local farm in Kansas city. And he's like, Hey, you should read this book. And it was called.
00:03:30
Speaker
folks, this ain't normal. And basically the premise of the book is that the way we do food today is totally weird. Like nothing in the modern food system is normal according to history, the way food's been grown. And I don't know if I've ever read a book that's impacted my life and changed my life so much as this one. So I started getting really passionate about
00:03:58
Speaker
Where does your food come from? How does it interact with your body? How does it interact with your health? What about the health of the planet, the soil, the water, the air quality? All of a sudden, within a couple of months, there was hardly anything I could talk about but regenerative farming.
00:04:18
Speaker
So I decided I actually wanted to change my career, if you will, and I wanted to get into farming. I saw that this problem was something that needed to be solved on a local level. And just having farmers like Joel around wasn't enough. We need good local farmers everywhere, all over the entire country. So I decided
00:04:44
Speaker
I'm going to be a farmer. I got to do this.
Learning the Craft at Polyface Farms
00:04:47
Speaker
This problem is so severe that I've got to do something to be the change in the system. So what I actually did was found out that Joel at Poly Face Farms was offering
00:04:59
Speaker
an internship. And they had about 10, 11 young people a year come out during the summertime. And basically, they take you teach you how to farm in about five months, super intense. And you sleep there, you eat with them, you farm with them all day, you're up at sunrise, you go to bed at dark,
00:05:22
Speaker
And you do it for about five months straight working crazy hours. So I heard he was doing this internship. So after I graduate college, I decided I'm going to apply try to get in just so happens that the year that I applied, there were 170 other people that applied that year. And they only picked 10 of us and somehow.
00:05:47
Speaker
The stars aligned and I got picked as one of the 10 people that got to be in the internship that year. So that's how I got into farming. I came in totally green.
00:06:01
Speaker
I had some kind of construction skills, but that's all I had under my belt. I didn't know what a freaking broiler was when I got to Poly Face. They were like, go move the broilers. And I was like, I don't know. Where's the oven? I have no idea what you're talking about. So I came in totally green. And man, I learned a lot in those five months.
00:06:24
Speaker
And it skyrocketed me into a journey that I guess you got more questions about and we can move into it. I guess following that, what were some of your biggest takeaways from that experience? Cause obviously that's, you got started down that path, but then that internship is really what must've cemented your, your desire to be a farmer. Obviously if you're going to figure out in those five months, whether you like it or not, or some of those takeaways from that experience.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, man. God, I learned everything. I say that I learned everything about how to raise animals, how to raise them well in a way that honors the animal, how to work with water systems in live animals and fencing. Basically I went in, I think the internship started in May.
00:07:08
Speaker
made October and I went in in May 1st. I didn't even know what a freaking broiler was. I didn't know what highly wire was. I didn't know the difference between a steer, a heifer and a cow. I didn't know anything. I just knew I wanted to be part of the fix in the American food system. And by the time I got out in October.
00:07:32
Speaker
I actually was hired by Joel Daniel, all the great guys over there at Polyface. They hired me to be a contract farmer for them on another property. I was raising turkeys, broilers, layers, cows, and ducks for them all on my own. So in five months, I was able to go from absolutely knowing nothing,
00:08:00
Speaker
I didn't even know what protein rations were for feed. And I was able to actually run a farm under the poly face umbrella. And I was able to farm for them all on my own, which may not seem like that crazy. But if you ever get around 300 head of cattle,
00:08:22
Speaker
at a time, yeah, you're going to want to know what you're doing. And all they give you is a single wire and a battery and you got to figure out how to keep 300 cows in different paddocks. And you got to be able to fix water problems on the fly. You got to be able to fix fence problems in a rush. Yeah. That experience, there's no price that I could put on that experience for getting me to where I was. So.
00:08:51
Speaker
I learned everything from how to build an egg mobile, how to run chickens, how to move cows every single day. I was not enough praise that I can give those guys for just training me, taking me from zero to a hundred in five months. That experience was awesome. And it eventually set me up for being able to do Chucktown down here in Charleston, South Carolina.
00:09:17
Speaker
That's so cool. Definitely sounds like they threw you off the deep end a couple of times too and just see if you could sink or swim.
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you have to, and that's the big test on who's going to make it. Who's going to be able to fight through this because farming is probably besides being a roofer down in Texas, this is probably the hardest job you can have. And so you need to have a litmus test for who's going to, who's going to be able to tough it out. I actually wasn't sure if I was going to be able to continue farming after we left Virginia. I was farming.
00:09:51
Speaker
as a contract farmer for three years. And then we actually moved down here to Charleston without any idea of whether we were going to farm again or not.
Founding Chucktown Acres: The Journey Begins
00:10:03
Speaker
I really wanted to, and I really wanted to look at a farm. But if anyone's been to Charleston, it's a beach town. So it's not a very rural area, but we love the area. We were actually in a position where we could go wherever we wanted and try to start.
00:10:20
Speaker
something fresh and something new. I wanted to start my own farm. We moved down here, actually get a landscaping job with my buddy. He started his own landscape business.
00:10:30
Speaker
And we needed somewhere to live and some money to come into the bank account while I tried to find a farm. One of the reasons that we actually chose Charleston, although we love this town, it's a gorgeous place to live. It's one of the coolest places to live. It's so beautiful. And the culture here is so rich and so fun, but I actually watched a documentary.
00:10:55
Speaker
And I don't know, I can't even remember which one I tried to go back and find it. I can't even remember which one it was, but it was about local food. It's the ground type of documentary. And then they interviewed a farmer down here in Charleston. And he was like really busy during the interview on the documentary. And he's, I'm trying as hard as I can, but there's no way I can raise enough chicken for Charleston County. Like these people are so crazy about local food, but I, there's not enough of me here.
00:11:24
Speaker
And so I took that as a hint. Oh, that's it. Put that in the back of our minds. Okay. Maybe that's a good spot. They got room for another farmer. If anyone knows like central Virginia, where, where I learned how to farm with poly face that there was a local farm, like every 10 miles and the competition is so crazy. I just didn't want to try to farm there. I wanted to go somewhere where it was maybe a local food desert.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so Charleston was an option. Then we came to visit, fell in love with the city, fell in love with the people here and we're like, let's find some land around the city and let's do this. So through a really wild series of events, I got in touch with a landowner who had just bought this property that we're on today.
00:12:11
Speaker
He bought the farm because he wanted to get to know his food better. He had a few health issues that came up in his life and he was actually able to heal most of his problems with local, sustainably raised food. He saw that there was a huge need for local food inherent that there wasn't enough farmers. So he actually bought the farm before he had a farmer to do the farming.
00:12:39
Speaker
We were here in Charleston for six months and I run into this guy and they asked me if I could be their farmer. And I said, absolutely. That was on a Sunday and on Monday I was here and I, yeah, I quit the landscaping job and they, they said they wanted cows, chickens, pigs. They wanted a garden. They wanted their own farm and.
00:13:07
Speaker
We actually, this is where Barnadore comes into the story.
Business Setup and Overcoming Challenges
00:13:11
Speaker
We actually signed on to Barnadore because I said, we can raise enough food for you guys, for your family. Obviously, no problem. This farm is 275 acres. Then, so we're like, okay, we can raise enough food for this family. Let's start a business too. And let's sell the food that we produce as well to help pay for this land, because this is a really beautiful, expensive property that we're on.
00:13:36
Speaker
So we go through a couple different name changes. We go through a couple different leadership changes. I actually go from being just the livestock guy to all of a sudden the owner of the property is asking me to start my own business here. So
00:13:54
Speaker
I take some time to think about it. My wife and I, we are really excited about the opportunity. We call a few people, get some advice and we agree and we're like, okay, let's do this thing. Let's start a business. So we changed the name.
00:14:10
Speaker
And we wanted something fun, but also something that was relative to Charleston and also something that told people we were a farm right away. So we came up with Chucktown acres for those who don't know. Chucktown is a nickname for Charleston. So we start and we start with 200 broilers, eight South Pole steers, six Berkshire hogs.
00:14:38
Speaker
and a half acre garden. And that was three years ago. Oh, I forgot to mention where Bonadora comes in as we need to sell some stuff. So how the heck do we sell this stuff? We can get into a farmer's market, but the farmer's market that we're in is actually only six months out of the year.
00:14:58
Speaker
So we've got to find a way to be able to sell this stuff during the off season, 12 months out of the year, even. So we started looking for software to be able to sell our products like an Amazon. Like we want it to be as simple and easy and frictionless as possible. We want to do home delivery. So this was right at the beginning of COVID.
00:15:23
Speaker
So this is like June 2020. Nobody's going to grocery stores. Nobody's going anywhere. Let's drop food off at people's door. And so we sign out bar to door and immediately people started buying stuff on our website. We just started like a little social media campaign. We got a handful of followers and then
00:15:50
Speaker
I started doing email campaigns and, and the business has really grown at a pretty rapid pace since then. The only thing that I didn't learn at Polyface was how to run this business by yourself. So that's been our journey so far. That's been the toughest thing for me so far, because I would much rather be moving cows and washing eggs then, then like.
00:16:18
Speaker
typing in my inventory of how many filet mignon I have. You're not alone. Yeah. You covered a lot there, but I was curious, like that transition of going from the livestock manager at the farm to now you're running the farm, you own the farm. How did that transition go about? Cause I know sometimes that's not an uncommon situation for people taking more and more ownership of their, of a farm over time. So how did that transition go for you?
00:16:46
Speaker
It was not easy and we had to have some personnel changes that, that were tough. And we had to start from scratch and it was hard, but it was also like really fresh and new and exciting at the same time. I was pretty scared, man. Like.
00:17:04
Speaker
I've never owned my own business before. I'm like totally new to all of this. So I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but I never have gone for it like this before. So yeah.
00:17:19
Speaker
The transition was really wild and I had a lot of great support and great help from the owners of the property. They really wanted to see me succeed. So like they were there at the farmer's market with me selling chicken breast and helping me get like a square set up so we can take credit cards at the thing because I had never even run a
00:17:42
Speaker
credit card by myself. I'm like, fuck, I'm supposed to be out with the turkeys, man. What am I doing here with this freaking computer and the square reader and plugging in people's email addresses into my Mailchimp account? Oh man, it was so, it was so wild. And it's stuff that I guess a lot of my buddies in the software world and in the computer world, they love this kind of stuff. And it's, they could do it in their sleep.
00:18:09
Speaker
But for me, I'm the exact opposite. Like they probably would have no idea how much protein to feed broiler chicks and the brooder, but they could run it. They can set up a square account in a minute. I had a lot of weaknesses that I had to fight through early on. And that was like, that was probably the hardest thing that we've
00:18:30
Speaker
dealt with is all my insufficiencies on how do you get the business set up? How do you do all the computer work? All of that. Thankfully, I'm through all that now. We do a MailChimp newsletter every week. We've got all of our systems in place now. So I'm actually able to be out with the animals and doing the business a lot more with the farming side of things than I have been able to the past two years.
00:18:57
Speaker
Because we kind of shot off like a rocket, and I was just trying to hold on and keep everything from falling off the edges of the ship. And so that's when we hired help. I was like, I need some help. I don't even have time to go move the broilers today. I got to get some help.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, that that transition from livestock guide to owner of a business that's growing like crazy rapidly was that was a wild ride and I'm still on it. Yeah. Well, I think something you pointed out there that is always our goal is that it definitely isn't an upfront time and learning investment that you got to figure these things out and it's a little work on the front end.
00:19:37
Speaker
But hopefully, over time, this software starts to do all the work for you. And the email marketing kind of does its thing for you, then takes those things back off your plate. And then like you're saying, hopefully get you more time where you can focus on moving cows and chickens and washing eggs and all that stuff. Yeah, I still remember emailing my account manager at the time.
00:19:58
Speaker
being like, Hey, I'm like afraid of the fulfillment's button and the schedules.
Testing Passion and Finding Mentors (Q&A)
00:20:03
Speaker
I'm like, I don't even want to touch that button because if I touch that thing, it's going to send me into a world unknown. And I am like terrified of this world. I don't know what it's like. What's the schedule? How do I set up one of those? Like, yeah, I had a lot of learning to go, but, but now you got it figured out, right?
00:20:22
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Not afraid anymore. But thank God for the account managers that you guys have because I, I have worn them out. Like, I just have so many questions and I.
00:20:37
Speaker
You get frustrated with stuff that I'm not good at. And like, I want to go do stuff I'm good at and I'm not good at this stuff. Folks like Richard, my current account manager, I just, I worked in depth, man, asking them to do stuff for me. And he's super patient, helpful, and we'll explain, Hey, you got to line up the schedule with the fulfillment and the drop spots. Okay. I'm like, okay, you got it.
00:21:00
Speaker
Thanks. That's good. That's great. I was curious, like in going from the internship to having your own farm, that, that whole process. And I know there's a lot of other programs like the one that you went through, or even just people going through an ag program at a school right now, maybe what would be your advice? I know you mentioned like some things you didn't learn through that program. What would be your advice to either a student or somebody that's going through some kind of farm training program, like the one you did?
00:21:29
Speaker
I would say I feel like the way I did it was super helpful. I think the most important part is if you're going to work with livestock or even if you're going to do veg and take care of plants, like you need to know what you're doing with that stuff first. And that is the most important thing. My advice would be test yourself first and make sure this is really what you want to do. And you're going to have to go lift hay bales. You're going to have to go weed a garden.
00:21:58
Speaker
You're going to have to go carry buckets of water to make sure this is really what you want to do. Luckily for me, the Polyphase program was so efficient and so well-structured that I got tons of learning in just five months. And I know I can speak for probably every farmer on the Barnadore program. We need volunteers and we want help.
00:22:22
Speaker
all the time. If someone was in an ag program here in town and asked if they could volunteer every Friday, I would take them up immediately on that. So that would be my first advice. If you go through all that and you decide, yeah, I do really still want to farm, I want to be a local farm with a business, I would tell them just like, you guys aren't paying me to say this, I would tell them to sign up for Barnador immediately and figure it out.
00:22:47
Speaker
because you guys handled so much of the backend work in logistics for us that I would not, if I wasn't using Barnador, I would just be doing farmer's markets and I wouldn't mess with anything else. So I would say, if you want to sell stuff, sign up with these guys because it's going to save you so much time and so much hassle and you're going to be able to grow
00:23:13
Speaker
way faster with using the software because your sales are going to be through the roof as soon as people hear about you. So that would be my next step. Probably my third piece of advice would be get a small business and have a mentor that's willing to walk you through. How do you do your taxes? How do you do your accounting? How do you set up QuickBooks? How do you set up MailChimp?
00:23:38
Speaker
When you've got 400 things on your to-do list, how do you prioritize which five to get done first? That is something that I think only someone who's been through the process of starting a small business can tell you, like, hold your hand through the process. Thankfully, I've had a handful of mentors, my dad being one of them, and I think people could
00:24:03
Speaker
really get a head start on their business and really get this ship off the ground if they can do those three things and you just might have a farm business after you're done with that. You mentioned the support there and I was curious like how has that support been for you and what are the things you've leaned on the most as you've taken over your farm and dealt more and more with that business side of things?
00:24:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think the owner of this property here that we're on, he's a very successful businessman and the phone calls I've had with him, if I can get from 20 to 30 minutes of his time, I learned like two years of college in those 30 minutes. I still remember like a piece of advice. The reason I send out a newsletter every week is because of something
Marketing Strategies and Customer Engagement
00:24:51
Speaker
he told me. He said, when you're a new business, people are going to forget you exist.
00:24:56
Speaker
And you have to try to not be annoying, but also you have to remind them that you exist. And for me, that blew my mind because I thought I'm this cool farm. I got freaking grass fed filet mignon and I'm 30 minutes away from Charleston. I didn't, I shouldn't need to advertise, but he was absolutely right. And I saw that immediately. If I did not send out, our sales would plummet. We're in our first second year.
00:25:26
Speaker
The difference between five sales and 20 sales is a huge difference for that week. I remember him telling me that and since then I have been religious about reminding people that we exist. I'm the kind of guy that didn't have social media before I started this farm because I wasn't a big fan.
00:25:46
Speaker
But we got it to remind people that we exist. And I think that's got a huge part to play in our growth as a farm business. We're raising way more animals now, feeding way more people than we were just three years ago. It's hard to quantify
00:26:05
Speaker
the value of a mentor of a business coach because there it's in the conversations that you have with them that your business could surpass 200 other businesses just because of one thing they told you.
00:26:18
Speaker
That's awesome. Some of you just touched on there was your social media and that, that I, it blows my mind. You didn't have it before because I think your social media game is pretty good. I like checking out your social media and you, but you do a really good job of kind of cycling through. We always are big on what we call the three E's, which is educate.
00:26:36
Speaker
entertain and e-commerce. So like kind of mixing those three things into your social media and all your messaging really, but you do a really good job of that. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but like I'll go on there and click and it's a video of you explaining like the regenerative practices that you're using and how your fields are recovering from the conventional farming that they were used from years ago. I was wondering if you could maybe talk about your approach to social media and what your goal is there other than staying top of mind what you mentioned.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's the main thing that I get on top of myself. I'll drive myself crazy. Oh, I don't have this perfect Instagram post, the filters and the sparkly stuff that people put on there. But I just remind myself, you have to remind them that you exist. You got to get in front of them. It doesn't matter if you put up a picture of a freaking egg, just put something up there. So I actually remember from the first time I listened to this podcast, you guys talked about
00:27:35
Speaker
the three E's and the entertainment part got me. I was like, Oh, you know what? There are people that blow up on, on Instagram, like
00:27:46
Speaker
freaking liver king, because they're just solely entertaining. And that is an amazing way to try to get people involved to it's almost like the business funnel, like the marketing funnel, you got to get people into your swirl before you can tell them your true message. Hey, we got to save the soil or else we're all going to run out of food. That's my message. But I just can't go on Instagram and say that over and over again. I got to show people like fluffy,
00:28:13
Speaker
pictures of the goats and I got to tell them like hey this field used to flood when it would rain and after three years of grazing rotationally with chickens and cows this field doesn't flood anymore. One of the wild things is that people really love the videos and I was so reluctant to do these freaking videos at the beginning
00:28:37
Speaker
because I felt like such an idiot. Like I'm holding a phone in front of my face in the middle of a 13 acre pasture. This is like with chickens around. If anybody saw me doing this, I would be so embarrassed. And I did my first video, I called it the power of chickens. And I was standing in a spot that our broilers had grazed through probably 20 days prior. And all around me,
00:29:07
Speaker
was grass that was like above my knees. And then everything else in the entire field was like up to my ankles. And I just said like, this is the power chickens, they will heal land way faster than anything else. You guys should support a local farmer. We got like 8000 views in a couple of days on this video.
00:29:28
Speaker
something happened in my heart and in my mind, I was like, ah, crap. I think I got to keep doing these. I didn't even know this was possible, but like people were sharing their, sharing my video of me standing in grass. And I was like, I don't understand this. Yeah. But social media is a huge tool and it's a free tool. And this is coming from a guy who does not enjoy social media. If I didn't have a foreign business, I still wouldn't have an Instagram.
00:29:56
Speaker
But this is me saying that if you do have a farm and you need more sales, more marketing, and you don't want to have Instagram and Facebook, get one today and just start putting it up pictures and start doing videos and explain to people what you do because they will not remember you exist unless you do that.
00:30:16
Speaker
I wanted to hit you with a couple of business questions, some ways that you've organized your store and the way that you're making it convenient for people to order
Innovations in Sales and Delivery
00:30:24
Speaker
from you. So first off, subscriptions. I know you've been offering these for a while now. What kind of success have you seen with the subscriptions and how did that go about implementing those? Yeah, we have started a weekly and a monthly subscription box option for folks.
00:30:44
Speaker
It was actually funny because it started out pretty slow and I wasn't sure, like I was reading all over the barn to door and other farmers looking at other farmers and their subscription boxes were like blowing up and everybody wanted to sign up and I built a few and was selling way more just chicken breasts and ground beef a la carte.
00:31:07
Speaker
than it was subscription boxes. So I wondered, I wonder if maybe we're just new and not enough people have tried our stuff yet, but I also wondered maybe people haven't seen what the box looks like yet. So actually what took our subscriptions to one or two people every week, all the way up to, we're up to 16 now every week. I started putting up the picture on Instagram every week.
00:31:35
Speaker
Here's what's in the box. It's just the meat laying in the grass with some eggs. And I was like, here's what our people, our members are getting this every single week that all of a sudden people were messaging me on Instagram. Hey, how do I get this thing? How do I sign up? People were showing pictures of it to their friends. And we started seeing tons and tons of signups. We had to stop people from signing up and we just opened it back up a few weeks ago.
00:32:04
Speaker
But I love putting that picture up on Instagram, making people jealous. Like Fred down the street is getting breakfast patties, ground beef, bone broth, eggs, and chicken breasts today. Don't you wish that you were.
00:32:18
Speaker
And all of a sudden, yeah, like everybody started signing up. So that's been great for us. We've seen a lot of people actually only complaint that we've ever gotten from our CSA. And we've gotten this a handful of times is it's too much meat. It's too much food.
00:32:36
Speaker
for the week. But no one has complained about the price at all. So we're going to go through a little bit of a change here pretty soon. And we're going to probably just adjust a little bit, maybe go down to one dozen eggs, and maybe just three pounds of meat and keep that as the weekly option and then boost our monthly boxes to try to push people if they want to load up, then they go to the monthly box. But we do those home delivery. So that's really helped a lot too, just taking the friction out of the process,
00:33:05
Speaker
People are like every time I tell someone that we delivered to their house, they're shocked. I can't believe it. I can get a local farm from 45 minutes down the way and I can have them drop the stuff off at my house. That's amazing. Yeah. That's awesome. That was going to be my next question for you because yeah, you mentioned that you've started doing delivery during the pandemic, but what was, how is that kind of grown? And have you been seeing more and more people shift to that fulfillment?
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah, we see it like during the winter time when we're not in any farmers markets, we're doing a lot of fulfillments and we're doing a lot of deliveries and we're
00:33:42
Speaker
We're really close to hiring a delivery driver because it's just one of us, me and Matt or I and my wife's been helping too. We'll just figure it out and we'll just get the deliveries done. People are surprised when they see the farmer at their house. That's a pretty cool interaction. They're like, oh, I thought it would just hire some dude to drive around and drop stuff off.
00:34:01
Speaker
We're pretty close to signing up with a delivery driver, just someone who can help us out. And so that's been great for us. They drop off a little bit during the farmer's market season because everyone in our delivery zone loves going to the farmer's market. So we haven't had to really blast it out during the summertime because the sales are still there through the farmer's market mostly.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah. That's awesome to hear that that's been getting bigger. And then I guess going back to the subscriptions too, that I was curious about, I know for a lot of farms, the subscription format, basically of getting that payment early, getting it ahead of time or having to get paid every week or every month, whatever the fulfillment schedule is for that subscription is different. And a lot of times people are like, whoa, this is great. I can have this money upfront. I can have this money guaranteed as I go. How was that experience been for you in the farm?
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, we decided to go strictly weekly payments or payments for every fulfillment because our sales are so kind of been kind of uncontrollable.
00:35:05
Speaker
that I don't, I would feel terrible if someone paid everything upfront for 12 weeks of meat and then I'm like out of sausage. I got to do a bunch of refunds. So we've had just clicking that button of just pay us every week. And if we're, if we've got a weird week or if we're out of something, I can just refund you or we can skip this week. And that's really helped. I have people that want to skip weeks a lot of the time. And so I can, we can do that really easily.
00:35:34
Speaker
So I've just stuck to pay every week and or pay for every fulfillment. And and so that's been working out great for us.
00:35:43
Speaker
Yeah. And I know a lot of people like that too, just cause you, you can avoid, especially with proteins. If you're paying an entire 12 week or 12 month subscription upfront, that can be a big price tag. And so having it's broken up into week by week or month by month can help to, to mitigate some of that as well.
Future Plans for Chucktown Acres
00:36:01
Speaker
Okay. Just to wrap things up then what's kind of next, what are some of the goals in the year ahead for Chuck down acres?
00:36:07
Speaker
So we're gonna try to keep growing. We're currently looking for more land that we can deal with our process and the way we manage these animals. We've maxed out the acreage here that we've got at this farm and so we're looking to expand
00:36:22
Speaker
We want to do more cows, more pigs, more chickens, and keep expanding our sales avenues, our sales outlets. We're looking to join more farmers markets. And so we're still in the uphill rocket ship right now. We're just, we're climbing. We want to make sure we're on top of all of our stuff with our.
00:36:44
Speaker
accounting, our marketing, our stay on double QuickBooks and stay on top of that, stay on top of the message, but also continuing to grow the amount of product that we raise and that we sell because the demand is there. People really want what we've got. And it's, there's a lot of excitement about what we're doing right now. So we're growing, we're just, growth is the goal right now. And we're going to see how long we can just keep growing for.
00:37:09
Speaker
Awesome. That's exciting. That's, it's really great to hear Alex. Thanks for sharing with us today and thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, it was a pleasure, man. Always a good time with you, Rory.
00:37:18
Speaker
I want to extend my thanks to Alex for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn to Door, we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farmers like Alex who implement sustainable agricultural practices and support their local communities. For more information on Chucktown Acres, you can visit chucktownacres.com. To learn more about Barn to Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm, go to barn to door.com slash resources. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
00:37:50
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Direct Farm podcast. You can subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts to automatically download new episodes. For more free resources that you can read, watch, and listen to, visit farntador.com slash resources. Thank you again for tuning in and we'll see you again next week.