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Exponential Farm Growth - Four Years Running, Farmer Spotlight: Honey Bee Hills Farm
150 Plays4 years ago
We're excited to spotlight a certified organic produce Farmer, and one of our newest Farm Advisors, Liz Mason of Honey Bee Hills Farm in Prospect Hill, North Carolina. Listen as she shares her story behind becoming a Farmer, her decision to sell direct online, and how she's managed exponential growth.
Show notes:
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
https://www.honeybeehillsfarm.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Direct Farm Podcast
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.
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the direct farm podcast.
Meet Liz Mason from Honeybee Hills Farm
00:00:28
Speaker
I'm Rory, your host for today's podcast. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our newest farm advisors, Liz Mason of Honeybee Hills located in Prospect Hill, North Carolina. Welcome Liz. Welcome to the show. It's really great to have you here and it's great to have you as one of our newest farm advisors in the farm advisor network. Could you maybe just start by telling us a little bit about your farm and what you produce?
00:00:51
Speaker
Absolutely. So we're located in Prospect Hill, North Carolina, which is the kind of North central or North Carolina near kind of Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill area. We grow about.
00:01:03
Speaker
10, depending on the season, 10 to 15 acres of organic produce. We grow year round. We grow a little bit of everything and a lot of a few things, but we grow all sorts of different annual produce. We're actually planting our strawberries today. So it's a long process of planting strawberries in October, taking care of them all winter long, trying to make sure the deer don't eat them too much and get them ready and pollinated and ready to bring to market in, we're lucky late April, but most years in May.
00:01:33
Speaker
Great. Is there anything that you guys are really excited about coming up with the fall season upon us now that you guys are excited to be offering to your customers?
Exciting New Crops at Honeybee Hills
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah, we've got for the first time this year, we've got a lot of different winter squash and some different pumpkins, cords, some crazy squash that we got into for the first time this year. This year we took a big leap into Brussels sprouts, which is another customer favorite. And so we went.
00:01:58
Speaker
a small planting of Brussels sprouts to almost a quarter acre. So my goal this year is to never tell anybody, sorry, I'm sold out of Brussels sprouts. Could you maybe talk about what you were doing before you started your farm?
From International Development to Farming
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah. So my husband and I both worked in international development consulting.
00:02:15
Speaker
We were primarily working with the U.S. Agency for International Development as contractors and we specialize in monitoring and evaluation. So that's kind of the part of the job where we go out and look at the results of the projects and say, you know, are the schools being built? Are the children actually learning how to read assessing the outcomes of for development aid in other countries?
00:02:39
Speaker
We've been doing that for a while and we're looking to move back to the US and spend some time here for family reasons. And we ended up buying this property here in Prospect Hill and had a gap in our employment. So we're in between contracts doing these international development careers and got bit by the farming bug. And then one thing kind of led to another, led to a book, led to talking to the extension office and getting lots of help from lots of different places and figuring out that we really enjoyed and were successful at growing
00:03:09
Speaker
produce. That's awesome. So could you talk about what the early beginnings of your farm looked like and maybe what you learned from some of those experiences as you were beginning to build your farm out?
First-Year Farming Challenges
00:03:19
Speaker
So our first farm, our first year farming, I guess I should say was about a half acre plot. Um, and everything was set up. It was about four or five, 50 by a hundred foot plots. So we grew on that the first year, about halfway through our first year, we bought our first high tunnel.
00:03:35
Speaker
So that we could continue to grow into the winter. And we did a lot of things at the 100 row foot scale. So we had a hundred feet of radishes and a hundred feet of turnips and a hundred feet of lettuce. And we just started there and coming into farming with absolutely no background, no knowledge, no family history. We had to learn everything.
00:03:55
Speaker
So you spend a lot of time on YouTube, spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. Once we started doing farmer's markets, we were talking to other farms and people were super helpful with sharing their experiences and helping us figure out what might work for us. And so we started from the ground up and just really focused on figuring out what worked for us and how to do it better and how to be more efficient.
00:04:17
Speaker
Cause you made me talk about how your farm has changed since then and how it's grown, especially kind of on the business side. I know you guys now have some employees working for you. So obviously you've seen a lot of growth since you first started planting.
Scaling the Farm and Managing Growth
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah. We've doubled in size every year, the last four years, we started about a half acre. Now we're up to about 15.
00:04:34
Speaker
give or take and so we hired our first employee in year two which was a huge education one from the the recruiting standpoint but then two from the paperwork and business owner standpoint we'd never run a business before we'd always been salaried employees somewhere so figuring out how do you hire somebody how do you do all your reporting how do you buy your taxes with a steep learning curve
00:04:56
Speaker
I was full-time and my husband was coming and going between contracts. And then very quickly he decided to join me full-time on the farm. In year two, we hired our first employee, which was a very steep learning curve as far as first how to recruit somebody. Second, the paperwork and business side of it. How do you hire somebody? How do you file your taxes? How do you register with employment? Do you have to have an employment insurance? All sorts of questions, one after another. And then the third thing, learning how to manage employees.
00:05:25
Speaker
And so our first year, we were a very flat organization. We all did the same thing. We're all harvesting and processing and doing things together. And as we've grown, we've added a farm manager role. And so working with my brother-in-law who manages our teams, working with him, he's working with the crew. I figuring out how to run an organization more than just a garden and turn it into a business.
00:05:47
Speaker
What would maybe be some of your advice to a farmer that might be just starting to hire some additional help on the farm? I think you need to know a lot about yourself and what you like to do and your management style and how you're going to work with your team. You know, it's never just as simple as hiring somebody, but it's about finding a person who fits in with the culture that you want to build as an organization to be able to achieve your goals.
00:06:09
Speaker
Which if you've never hired anybody before, that might sound a little silly, but thinking through how you want to structure things and who's going to do what is super important to building the team to get the work done. Definitely. That's kind of almost an area of your farm brand that you don't really think about maybe from the start, but how your employees are kind of an extension of that.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, building a team and figuring out what people are good at too, has been an interesting thing. When we first started hiring people, we just thought of the farm as this one big activity. Whereas really there's a lot of little different things and somebody might not be super good at harvesting, but maybe they're really good at creating transplants and seeding. We had one woman work for us. Her secret superpower was weeding. She was the best at going out and making a bed completely weed free. And so figuring out what people's strikes and
00:06:53
Speaker
skills and interests are and figure out how to structure your team can be really super useful. That's a great skill to have too. Weeding. I feel like that's the one job that nobody ever wants. So that's good to have somebody around that's really good at it. It was magical while she was here. Yeah, I bet. At some point along that line, you guys decided to transition your products, be able to sell them online.
Pandemic-Driven Shift to Online Sales
00:07:13
Speaker
Cause you talk about what went into that decision of moving online to sell your farm products and why specifically you chose to do that with barn to door.
00:07:20
Speaker
At the beginning of our pandemic, two of our five farmers market, the physical structure required them to flow. March is the time of year when we're already planted, right? The crops are in the ground. The greatest is going to come up no matter what. We've already hired staff.
00:07:36
Speaker
We've got people on board and we've made these commitments. So what do we do now? So our first pivot, we did two things simultaneously. The first was to offer home delivery and we started offering home delivery just to our customers who were around our markets that had closed. But then we realized there was a larger demand with people.
00:07:55
Speaker
A lot of our customers were folks who were unable or uncomfortable going out in public. They were having things delivered to their homes anyway, and they were excited about the opportunity for farm fresh organic food to come to them. So the home delivery expanded naturally at first, originally for farmers, market customers, and then into a broader audience. But then the other thing that we saw a huge demand for, we decided to start offering free orders. And so letting people order from the farm and at the end, they could grab their bag and go.
00:08:24
Speaker
They didn't have to wait in line. They could come before the market. They could come after the market. They could avoid the crowds and the rush where there were ones. And so we had a segment of our customers who were really interested in pre-orders. My very first iteration of attempting to do these things was a Google form and it was fine, kind of.
00:08:43
Speaker
I then used Squared for a while to organize our sales through their online platform. And it was okay, but when we started looking at making home delivery and pick up a permanent part of our business, we really needed a software that was flexible and understood the nuances of farming. And I looked at a number of different softwares and borrowed the doors by far the best fit for the things that we wanted to do. And so now a year and a half later.
00:09:09
Speaker
I have five different pickup sites at different times throughout the week. We have four different delivery routes that are based on zip codes and delivery times. And it got really complicated, really fast. And we appreciated the way that Artador makes the data management side of it easy, the inventory management easy, and the reporting that comes out of the system works pretty well for our team. So a big part of your business is your CSA program. And like you said, you're doing pre-orders and delivery. How do you set that up to make it as easy as possible for them to buy from you?
00:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, we had dabbled in CSA's in the past at a pretty small scale of about 10 households and had retired it. It really wasn't working for us from a management perspective. One of our requirements when looking for a software to use was that it made the CSA process easier as opposed to harder. And the feedback that we've gotten from our customers, I think we like our door because
00:10:03
Speaker
Cause all levels of customers can use it. We have customers who want to go and they pay for it and they never have to think about it again. And it's just done and they don't have to worry about it. We then have customers who get the small size share, but they really want more produce. And so they go into the system every week and they order add-on item. And the bar to door clothware just allows on the backend, everything gets combined. So when we're packing the orders, we just get all that information in one and we're not looking at multiple places for it.
00:10:30
Speaker
And then a certain thing is the newer feature where you can pay for the subscription as you go, which is great. Some people want to pay up for it and we offer them a discount for paying out for it. And then folks who want to pay by the week, they just put in their credit card information and it's like any online subscription where it gets billed and you don't have to worry about it going forward.
00:10:49
Speaker
What's kind of the feedback been from your customers that kind of made the process easier for them? Yeah, I think for the people who just pay once and never interact again, they're satisfied with whatever system we chose. It really makes it easier for people who want to interact with the farm on a more frequent basis and get those add-on items. It also makes it easier for customers who go in and out of the CSA programs.
00:11:10
Speaker
So we run a year-round CSA, but we split it into three seasons. So a lot of people want the summer produce, but they don't necessarily want to sign up for the winter CSA, which I get. I really like greens and roots, but if you don't like kale, you're going to get a little bored sometimes. And so this week we actually transitioned to summer CSA to work all DSA. And what Using Bar to Door has made possible is that our folks who were in the summer CSA, but didn't want to sign up for the fall CSA, they went on the website today and they just ordered a basket of whatever they wanted to deliver.
00:11:39
Speaker
And so they can still be our customers. They can still interact with the same platform without having to make any changes of being a CFA customer or not being a CSA customer. That's awesome. And you can keep them around still, not necessarily have that change of seasons mean that you lose your customers. It's great that you can still engage with them and have them still be buying from you. So we've kind of talked a little bit about your delivery program and it sounds like it has become a pretty major part of your business. How did you go about establishing that program?
00:12:05
Speaker
So the first thing that we did, we had about a week notice before our commerce markets closed. And so that last market that we went to, we asked everybody to give us their email addresses and said, we're going to be offering delivery to your area. We'll send you an email. We'll try to stay in touch. I want to say that was maybe 30 people. It was pretty small.
00:12:21
Speaker
After that, we went on to social media and advertised specifically the communities around the few markets that were closed. And out of that process, we had people coming and asking, oh, well, I'm not at Hillsborough. I'm at Durham. Can you deliver to me? And we're like, sure, we'll do that. We grew our audience through social media for a while. And then we've done a little bit of advertising on Facebook. And then we also advertise last year on our local NPR station.
00:12:48
Speaker
So you mean you've done a mix of both organic social media posting as well as the paid ads? Yeah. Oh, we also, our big physical advertisement is that we wrapped our van. So our delivery van has some cool graphics on the side of it for our goodness grown goodness delivered, Logan.
00:13:04
Speaker
Well, I know you guys recently signed up and have been using the Routeific integration to manage that delivery program. What's kind of your experience been with Routeific so far? Yeah. So we really liked the integration with Routeific and, you know, the fact that with a one button click to move our data from bar to door into the routing software. You know, we've had a little bit of challenges with internet access where we are, have a stable data connection.
00:13:29
Speaker
But in general, and we were using a different software before and using routing software has been great. That saves time.
00:13:36
Speaker
That's good to hear. I think definitely something we hope to continue to work with them on is just optimizing that more and more for farmers. So we definitely want that feedback from farmers, the good and the bad, and hopefully take that and make it even better. So I guess we kind of already touched on some of your social media and how you've gone about advertising and your vans that are decal, which is awesome, but also through your social media, the email marketing, because you maybe share your approach to social media and how you choose which content to share with your audience.
00:14:03
Speaker
I try to do one social media post per day, six days a week. I will sometimes take Sunday off and get a little rest. I like to take pretty pictures and show there's a lot of you be here on the farm, which is nice to share. Yeah. I like to share a little bit about our process and what we do.
00:14:18
Speaker
how we farm, it's important to us that we are organic and that we follow organic practices. And our goal is to take care of the earth and grow high quality nutritious food. So trying to share a little bit about how we do that. And I think also just a little bit of transparency goes a long way. I post a lot of pretty pictures, but there's a lot of not pretty stuff on a farm. Historically, we've had salad mix year round and a lot of our markets for the only people with it summer.
00:14:43
Speaker
We're one of very few farms with it in the winter. We just lost all of our lettuce to a insect that came in and ate it pretty much all within 48 hours and destroyed it. Kind of shared a little bit about, okay, so we don't have lettuce at the market this week and this is why. I mean, this is what happened and this is how we deal with it organically. This is what we're doing to try to make sure it doesn't happen again, but it's not always pretty and it's frequently not easy and cool to be a farmer.
00:15:07
Speaker
sharing both sides, I think people appreciate that. People like having updates about like what's coming next and what crops are here, but you know, also understanding why certain things aren't available at different times of year, either just because of the seasonality of it and what is possible to grow at what points of the year in North Carolina, or, you know, the challenges we face in losing a crop to disease or to pests. This summer, we had very little rain and we actually ended up tilling some crops in because we didn't have enough water in our well to be able to water them.
00:15:35
Speaker
And so there's a lot that goes on. It's like sharing and letting people know where their food comes from is a good way to connect with your customers and your community. What's the feedback from your community, Ben, on a lot of those things? People have been really supportive. I feel like in general, people want you to succeed and especially if they understand where your failures and weaknesses have happened.
00:15:56
Speaker
and what you're doing to address them, they're still going to be interested in your farm and seeing you succeed as a farm and come back once that crop is available again. It's been overwhelmingly positive. I think it's also been interesting to have conversations with people at the farmer's market about, oh, I didn't know this was that hard or I didn't know that was a challenge. And so the education side of it has been really interesting because I've only been farming for four years.
00:16:21
Speaker
Right? So five, six, seven years ago, I didn't understand the seasonality of vegetables, right? And why can't I go to the farmer's market and buy cucumber that's grown in the field in November? And so education's been a huge thing for us as farmers and being able to share some of that knowledge and understanding of the seasons, you know, organic and stewardship has been a really interesting part of the farm and something that I think we're blessed to be able to share with people.
00:16:49
Speaker
And that's really cool that you guys have been able to do that through social media too, that people don't necessarily have to go to your farm and visit you or go to the farmer's market and talk with you there, but you're able to conveniently provide that in a different way. And then hopefully that leads to them making a purchase from you down the road. Two years ago, three years ago, we had all of these plans about how we were going to be open to the public and people were going to come out here and we were going to have a farm stand. And then last spring when the pandemic started up, it was a hard stop for us.
00:17:15
Speaker
And so social media has given us a way to reach out to people and connect to people and give them that connection to the farm, even though we're not necessarily set up at this point in time to be able to welcome them in person on site.
Building Trust with Organic Certification
00:17:28
Speaker
So you guys are certified organic. How does your organic certification establish that loyalty and trust among your buyers, but then also contribute to your overall brand?
00:17:36
Speaker
The reason that we initially signed up for organic certification was the signaling aspect of it. It makes it very clear to customers that we have a certain set of standards and we farm by those standards. There can sometimes be some misconceptions about what organic actually means. And so also being able to help people understand what are organic practices and what makes it different than some conventional practices or other ways of farming that are in between the two.
00:18:05
Speaker
Definitely. So how do you kind of use that certification to help you communicate with buyers? Are you actively trying to promote that? It's definitely something that our organic certification that we talk about, and I talk about it on social media, talk about it with customers at the farmer's market. For us, it's just an easy way to communicate what the quality standard is that we follow. Around your farm brand, organic is a word that kind of translates a lot. What would be some of those other words that you try to have associated with the Honeybee Hills brand?
00:18:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think high quality is important to us. So we like to provide high quality produce. Food safety is super important to us. We do also do some wholesale and in order to do wholesale, there's all sorts of different rules and regulations that you have to follow. The good agricultural practices gap is
00:18:53
Speaker
One of the gold standards here in the US for wholesale, we have not become GAAP certified because it is a costly process. And it's not something that we need right now for the small amount of wholesale that we do, but we are GAAP compliant. And so we've taken a lot of additional food safety staff that many smaller farms don't necessarily go through. So food safety, I think it's super important to us and I think to our customers as well.
00:19:17
Speaker
Well, going back to some of the ways that you're connecting with customers, have you utilized the MailChimp integration to reach customers through
Engaging Customers with Newsletters
00:19:24
Speaker
email? Yeah, it's been great. We use MailChimp for two weekly newsletters and I was actually using MailChimp before we switched over to Bar to Door. So it's a platform that I like and I've used for a while.
00:19:36
Speaker
felt lucky that that was also, or chosen email newsletter service to integrate into. And so it's really nice that anybody who purchases something in my store automatically is signed up for my general weekend newsletter. I don't have to do any additional work to add those contacts. And so that's great. It just happens automatically. So I send out a Monday newsletter with kind of going on about the farm, new products we have in store, any updates about which markets we'll be at or details for deliveries for the week.
00:20:04
Speaker
And then I also use Mailchimp to do an email every week to our CSA members, which includes what's going to be the CSA, any recipes or cooking tips. And then also if integration back into Martador with some links on if there's anything that they might want to add to their CSA for that week. And so the buttons that can be added into the emails that highlight certain products have been super useful because I can highlight the products and that makes it easy for customers to find exactly where to purchase those in the online store.
00:20:31
Speaker
That's really cool. You make those recommended products, your add-ons, and hopefully nudge customers towards adding on some extra produce to their regular CSA. Do you guys actively try and collect more email addresses to try and grow that audience for the newsletter? It is on the website that hearted or built for us. So it's on all those pages. People can sign up. And then I also use the Facebook integration or MailChimp. So it hosts or Facebook account, a link to the weekly newsletter. So people can click on that and sign up that way.
00:21:00
Speaker
And then in terms of the return on some of those newsletters, have you seen much success in terms of those newsletters actually translating to sales and people looking on those product recommendations and things like that? I think about 80% of our online sales come within six hours of the Monday newsletter that I send out. So there's a really direct correlation between sending out my weekly newsletter and people placing their weekly orders or delivery or pickup.
00:21:24
Speaker
Would you say that kind of goes for both of those newsletters that you send out the CSA one and your general farm update one? Yeah. So most of our orders come through the farm update and then the CSA people tend to order throughout the week. I don't know more contact with the CSA folks because we have a private Facebook group where we share recipes of what people are cooking for the week. And then I run into them at the farmer's market and things like that. So the CSA group tends to be interacted with a little bit more than our larger email list.
00:21:51
Speaker
That's something I think a lot of people find the CSA or subscription format does enable you to have that recurring interaction with customers. Could you maybe speak to that and how that has helped ensure you sell all your produce and how having recurring customers and recurring engagement kind of locks in your audience a little better.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah. So I think having a subscription option is really nice to get people into a weekly interaction with the farm. And so some people we have the subscription is the only thing that they interact with us on and they get the weekly delivery and that's it. We have another equally large group of people who really like to add things onto their orders. And so they have our green subscription or they have this.
00:22:31
Speaker
small produce subscription and then they add things on. And so being able to interact with them on a weekly basis and then email update about what's going on with the farm is that thing that jogs the memory of like, Oh yeah, I need to go put those things in my cart. So the subscription format is really nice for us as a farm because it creates those long-term relationships. It also helps smooth out our sales. So when you're really reliant on farmers market, they can be weather dependent, for example.
00:23:00
Speaker
or this weekend was the UNC Duke football game. And so all of a sudden our traffic at the market plummeted to almost zero at 1130 because the game served it. So since traditional clubs know in advance what that demand is going to be, spread it out over the season, make it a regular thing. The online platform allows us to manage it in a way that makes it a little bit easier. Like if somebody wants.
00:23:22
Speaker
to skip a week or double up, they're going to be on vacation this week. They can double up a week after and it helps us manage that data. The CSA subscription has also allowed us to expand into some interesting crop beyond just basics, things that people may not necessarily pick up. Like if you go to a farmer's market and you're picking your five vegetables, it may not be the thing that you pick up, but if it shows up at your house and you have the challenge to cook it or eat it.
00:23:49
Speaker
before it goes bad, all of a sudden you might find that you like this new thing, even though it's not something that you would have necessarily picked up at the farmer's market. So it's helped us at the farm try new things. And with very few exceptions, we've always gotten positive feedback on those more interesting vegetables and offer them in the future again. So that's been really interesting, being able to diversify the things that we grow.
00:24:10
Speaker
And it sounds like you guys don't give customers the option to pick and choose what's going to be in their CSA. So how does having a set box help you manage your inventory and make sure that you are moving all those products, even if it's something that people wouldn't pick out at a farmer's market?
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, for our produce DSA, we offer two different subscription sizes. So people who are not picky eaters or are interested in vegetables across the board, they'll get the larger subscription and then customers who want fewer vegetables will get the smaller option. Our process as a farm for packaging things is relatively streamlined because all the bags are the same. We set things up and do them assembly line fashion and gives us a production plan for the week that as long as everything grows properly, as long as we get
00:24:50
Speaker
harvest it, and as long as my powers of prediction on Sunday night, when I'm making all these things up holds true, we can go through and create these set bags for everybody for their delivery day or pickup day. So as a final question, what do you kind of hope to accomplish next at Honeybee Hills as you guys are continuing to grow, which is awesome to hear that you've had such consistent growth year over year, but what do you hope to kind of tackle next?
Future Goals for Honeybee Hills Farm
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah. So we've essentially hit our physical boundaries here on the farm. We've broken land on almost all of our acres that we could plant. And so, you know, for us on the farming side, now we're looking at efficiency and density and crop health. How do we maintain our momentum, have fewer crop losses, have higher yields, you know, kind of those more technical aspects of farming. We're definitely looking to continue to grow our CSA program.
00:25:35
Speaker
We don't think that we have maxed that out at all. We have more that we grow and more that we would love to offer our communities, you know? And then another thing that we're really looking at going forward is reducing use of plastic as much as we can. And so we've switched over to paper-based products wherever we can. We're trying to minimize our single-use plastic here on the floor.
00:25:54
Speaker
farm in our farming practices. And so figuring out how to support home delivery, how to support pickup options in farmer's markets. It's an interesting challenge in the food realm, just because our food systems are super based on plastics, at least specifically organic food are based on the use of plastics. And so we're trying to figure that out and move forward and decrease that where we can.
00:26:14
Speaker
That's great to hear. I'm excited to hear how that keeps going for you guys. I want to extend my thanks to Liz for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barnadore, we are humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farmers like Liz who implement sustainable agricultural practices and support their local communities. For more information on Honeybee Hills, visit honeybeehillsfarm.com.
00:26:35
Speaker
To learn more about Barn to Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm, go to barn2door.com slash resources. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.