Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Growing a Sustainable Direct-to-Market Farm Business
603 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, Alex Russell of Chucktown Acres shares his knowledge and experience as a direct-to-market Farm business owner in a webinar hosted by the Rodale Institute.
Chucktown Acres is a regenerative Farm located near Charleston, SC that aims to produce an high quality food and educate their customers on the importance of sustainable agricultural practices.
The Rodale Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to growing the organic movement through rigorous research, farmer training, and consumer education.
chucktownacres.com
rodaleinstitute.org
barn2door.com/resources
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the go-to resource for farms across the US looking to grow and manage their business. Tune in weekly to hear tips and tactics from our most successful farmers on how to increase sales, access more customers, and save time and money. We'll
Industry Trends and Expert Insights
00:00:18
Speaker
also speak with industry experts, business leaders, and partners to share the latest farm business trends selling direct to market.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast.
Rodale Institute's Farm Training Program
00:00:29
Speaker
We've got a great conversation for you today from a presentation we did for the Rodale Institute's farm training program. The Rodale Institute is a non-profit dedicated to growing the organic movement through rigorous research, farmer training, and consumer education. Widely recognized as the founder of the organic movement, Rodale Institute has been a global leader in regenerative organic agriculture for over 70 years.
00:00:52
Speaker
Their farm training program guides interns through rigorous farm training while also hosting educational series like this.
Starting Direct-to-Consumer Farm Business
00:00:59
Speaker
For this presentation, we partnered with Alex Russell of Chucktown Acres located in Charleston, South Carolina. We were delighted to have Alex join us and speak to his experience in starting and growing a direct-to-consumer farm business. We hope you enjoy it.
00:01:14
Speaker
Thanks everyone for having us here today. I'm Rory. I'm with Barnadore. And of course we have Alex here with us today. And so we're going to mostly, this is just going to be focusing on Alex and his business and how he's grown that over the last couple of years. I know Alex, you're definitely still in the thick of growing that, but Alex has a pretty similar experience to you guys, which is really cool. That's why we wanted him to be able to talk to you today. And so we're going to be talking about his kind of journey from being an intern at another farm.
Journey of Alex Russell
00:01:39
Speaker
and going into starting his own business and then some of the kind of things he's doing to be successful but Alex, I'll go ahead and shut up and let you take it away. Okay, awesome. Thank you guys for having me. I'm coming to you live from Charleston, South Carolina. I run a farm called Chucktown Acres and what we do is we take regenerative practices which I'm sure you guys are learning all about.
00:02:07
Speaker
We raised a grass-fed beef. Forest raised pork pastured poultry. And we also do like a no spray organic strawberry you pick on our farm. And we're in year three right now. So I wanted to share my experience with you guys so far. Barnadore has actually held our hand through the entire thing before we even launched our business, we joined with Barnadore.
00:02:35
Speaker
So they've been instrumental in helping us along the way of becoming a local farm for local people that want to buy from a farm close to them. So we're here. We do not have all the answers. We don't have it all figured out, but we are loving the process so far. And I guess we're going to start here with my personal journey as a farmer.
00:03:01
Speaker
I didn't grow up in a farming family. I didn't grow up in the country. I was a suburbs kid. My dad was a cop. We were just like normal people, I guess you'd say. Just suburbs driving a minivan kind of people. And I ended up going to a Bible college out in Kansas city because I thought I wanted to become a preacher, a pastor,
00:03:30
Speaker
someone who takes care of other people. And that seemed to be the most important thing to me. While I was in this Bible college, I started making a bunch of hippie friends. And these guys are like drinking raw milk. And I had one friend that actually only ate raw meat was his diet. And I started making all these weird friends. And these guys started talking about like,
00:03:59
Speaker
Where do you get your food? And for me, I was just a city kid. Like I never thought about like where you get your food other than you get your food from the grocery store. So all of a sudden my eyes started being opened by like, wow. Um, I don't know where this food comes from and I don't know how it was raised and what happened while I was in Bible college.
00:04:24
Speaker
is I actually got a mentor and he was a big fan of this guy named Joel Salton. And I'm guessing y'all being at the Rodeale Institute probably have heard Joel's name or heard some stuff from him or watched the talk. I read this book called Folks, This Ain't Normal. And what happened was my mentor gave me this
Challenges and Learnings in Farming
00:04:45
Speaker
book. He says, you gotta check this book out. It's gonna rock your world.
00:04:49
Speaker
And so I read this book and there's this quote in here, it says, the magical marvelous food on our plate, the substance we absorb has a story to tell. And at that point I was like, what do you mean the food has a story to tell? It's just like sustenance, I'm hungry, I eat. But as I started reading this book, I started
00:05:09
Speaker
recognizing that the food was once alive, someone had to grow it, someone had to harvest it. So the quote goes on, it has a journey, it leaves a footprint, it leaves a legacy to eat with reckless abandon, without conscious, without knowledge, folks, this ain't normal. So in the book, Joel describes how we've gone from ever since humans became humans,
00:05:38
Speaker
all the way up until like our great grandparents, everyone knew where the food came from. They knew who was growing it or they hunted or they harvested, they gathered. They knew who the milkman was. They knew where the food was coming from. And all of a sudden, right around World War II, the food industry takes a massive change. It takes a huge shift into this industrialized situation where all of a sudden we can produce food
00:06:08
Speaker
because of machinery and technology and chemicals, we can produce food in like warehouses, in factories. And all of a sudden they just completely changed the game. You think about TV dinners coming in and grocery stores start blowing up. And all of a sudden we're in this completely abnormal state of our relationship with food.
00:06:32
Speaker
Before then, food was the center of your being. You had to make sure you were going to secure food. You had to know how to grow it. Everyone had a garden back then, at least. So all of a sudden, I realized while I was reading this book, I think I want to become a farmer.
00:06:53
Speaker
I felt that the need to understand this system and to understand the nourishment that our bodies need, how food's grown, how it affects the environment and the ecology, I decided I want to become a farmer. So I went ahead and signed up for this guy's internship. And I don't know how the application process is for Rodale, but when I applied for Polyphase,
00:07:21
Speaker
there were 171 people applied that year, and they only took 10 of us. And somehow by the skin of my teeth, they got me in, they chose me to be one of the guys, I guess I said some good jokes. I'm not sure. But all of a sudden, I get into this very intensive, very beautiful and
00:07:47
Speaker
strenuous internship where I farm with Joel Salton, his son, Daniel, their right hand man, Eric, all of a sudden I'm toe to toe with these guys every single day, seven days a week for five months.
00:08:02
Speaker
And we're doing pastured poultry, grass-fed beef, we're doing pork, we're doing turkeys and ducks, and they have massive gardens on the farm. And all of a sudden, I'm just getting drowned in this world of farming, and I'm loving every second of it. And I just connect with the process, thinking this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
00:08:25
Speaker
What happens after this internship goes through, it's a five month deal. I ended up getting hired by them to run what they call rental farms, contract farms, basically getting to farm underneath the umbrella of poly face. But I've got this 200 acres that I'm running and they just basically bring me cows, pigs, turkeys, laying hens, broilers, and they're like,
00:08:52
Speaker
take what you learned, raise these animals, and we'll come when they're ready to harvest. I got this amazing segue into the farming world by learning how to run a farm by myself, but not having to sell the stuff, not having to market it. I was just a guy. I was just a grower. I was just learning. The most important thing
00:09:15
Speaker
which is making sure these animals have an awesome experience, an awesome life and would grow super high quality food. That was my only goal. And I would not ever change that for anything because now today I'm farming with so much confidence and knowing the systems, I've been able to just take what I learned there at Polyphase, plug it in to what I do now at Chucktown and
00:09:45
Speaker
Now I can actually spend more time on sales, marketing, social media, QuickBooks, all the stuff that comes with being a solo entrepreneur. I'm able to spend time with that and not have to go through like a million mistakes of starting my own farm from scratch with no experiential knowledge.
Chucktown Acres: Growth and Adaptation
00:10:07
Speaker
So what happens is we moved down here to Charleston after three years of working for a poly phase.
00:10:14
Speaker
And I found a guy who had just bought a 270 acre farm and he needed a farmer. And I ran into him at church one day and it was like the stars all aligned, the angels were singing. And I hadn't planned this out at all. I was just at the right place at the right time. He told me he was like about to.
00:10:38
Speaker
fill out like an application deal for people to apply to farm at his farm, but he met me the day before he put that out. So, anyway, he hires me to be the livestock guy, he has a veggie guy already, he hires me to be the livestock guy.
00:11:00
Speaker
we were going to be a full fledged veggie and protein farm. No one really does it. There's a reason nobody really does it. And it didn't work out very well. The veggie grower decided to quit. And all of a sudden, I go from being a hired hand to the owner asking me to start my own business and do this thing myself.
00:11:28
Speaker
I'm kind of freaking out. I'm, I'm not sure how to do this, but I do have confidence in my experience before that I can at least raise the animals. And then let's go on the process of figuring out how to run a business, open a bank account, do the taxes, the QuickBooks, the marketing, the Instagram, all that stuff. I've been flying by the seat of my pants off the last three years, but thankfully because I've
00:11:58
Speaker
joined these guys at Barn to Door. They always put out tons of helpful material for us to use. And it's just been awesome experience so far. And I've been able to really grow as a business owner in my experience here. What we do now is we are a direct to market farm. We have customers that buy from us direct.
00:12:25
Speaker
And then we also have wholesale accounts, a few restaurants. We have a few people that help with the eggs. And then, and then we have a couple of very small grocery stores that we've gotten into. Right now, what we're honing in on is we're picking these products that aren't working and we're picking the products that are working and we're honing in.
00:12:49
Speaker
on what we've got and what people like. So we tried a few different things. We tried lamb. We tried to do a bunch of produce and we figured out those things are not going to be working for us. And so now we're kind of narrowing down. What do people want? What do we do here? We also have a pretty harsh climate.
00:13:13
Speaker
So South Carolina, very humid, very hot, very high parasite levels. And so we're trying to figure out what's the best so far. We've got the beef. People are crazy about the chicken, the pork, the big three people love, and you can't go wrong with those eggs. Also probably should be the big four eggs are dominant and people just love farm fresh eggs and they can't get enough.
00:13:42
Speaker
So the other thing that we've noticed is that we also launched during the June of 2020, right? So the world's falling apart. We got COVID. It's a disaster. Everything's going crazy. But people wanted to get out of their house. They wanted to be in the sunshine somewhere and go experience something with their kids, put all the theme parks, the playgrounds, everything's closed.
00:14:10
Speaker
So what we decided to do is we did these hayride tours. And I kid you not, I would just put something on Instagram and just say, Hey guys, we're doing a hayride tour. Come see the animals with us. And everybody will just lose it. They go bonkers. They'd sign up. We fill up the thing super fast. And we still do that today. So that's one of the products that we've learned. And I think in starting your farm business, you have to
00:14:39
Speaker
give yourself the flexibility to play around with what's going to work and what's not. And you have to knock on a bunch of doors. We also have one farmer's market that we're in and we want to do more, but I'm still a solo entrepreneur. I got a family. I got a business that I run. So another thing I'm going to just keep plugging, barring the door probably the whole time.
00:15:05
Speaker
But we have only had to join one farmer's market because we have Barn to Door. People can go on our website, they can say, I want two chuck roast, I want a London broil, three dozen eggs, and I want you to bring it to my freaking house. And we do it. And if we didn't have Barn to Door, we wouldn't be able to do that. And I'd probably be in like six farmer's markets to try to make up that time. But
00:15:35
Speaker
Barnadores found a way that people can order my food at midnight if they want. When they're thinking about, ah, dang, I got to make my menu for the next week to feed my family, we can do that because people can go on the website and order. The nice thing is doing those farmer's markets, at least the one we're in, it's a very popular one. I get to see all my customers' faces. I get to talk to them. I get feedback on the products.
00:16:06
Speaker
I would always suggest if you guys are going to be starting your own farm business, at least get into one farmer's market. The more the barrier, but you're going to be able to build your email list way faster because we just have a clipboard at the farmer's market with some blank sheets that says, give us your email. And our email list is up to 1600 people in three years, which I think Rory, that's pretty good. And
Marketing Strategies and Customer Engagement
00:16:33
Speaker
that's not,
00:16:34
Speaker
come from our Instagram. Like that's, I think about 80% of those signups have come from that farmer's market and people getting to meet the farmer, the guy who grows the food, I'm nice, I get to be charismatic. And then people are like, Oh yeah, I'll sign up for that email list. And we'll probably get into this later, but the email list is an absolute non-negotiable. You got to have an email list if you're going to have your own farm business. But we have to remember that.
00:17:04
Speaker
We are the anomalies here in the agriculture space in this country. I don't know the stat, probably 95 to 98% of farmers do not sell direct to their consumers. They are under the strong arm of companies like Tyson, Purdue, Iowa Beef, Smithfield, like they, those big conglomerates
00:17:30
Speaker
hire farmers, abuse them, pay them trash, and then it's the biggest turnover ever, and no one wants to be a farmer anymore.
00:17:43
Speaker
And it makes sense because you work all day. Maybe you're a soybean guy or a corn guy and the weather's not right. And you lose your whole crop and you basically become a guy who takes insurance, you know, crop loss insurance checks for your living instead of like actually being a real farmer that grows food for people to eat. So.
00:18:10
Speaker
We are the weird ones in this space when it comes to, I'm a farmer, I grow the beef, I take the beef to the farmer's market and I sell it to Sally and Jim. So that's something that's coming back. I guess if you were to look at farmers in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, it was probably the weirdest thing to meet a farmer that actually sold
00:18:36
Speaker
his food that he grew to people at their house. With the Industrial Revolution, food just became this globalized thing that we, the farmers just grew the food, sold it to some giant company and they spread it out all over the world. Even today, 60% of the soybeans grown in America go to China. And so we're like using up all this American space to grow this crop,
00:19:06
Speaker
that is sprayed with tons of glyphosate and then we ship it over to China instead of what we could be doing. We could be having cows and chickens on that pasture making it this beautiful carbon sequestering masterpiece instead
00:19:21
Speaker
we're spraying it, we're telling it, and we're sending it over to China. And when I started to learn about all this stuff, that's what got me fired up to be a farmer and to be a part of the change in the system that we're in. Because right now, farmers only make up 1.3% of the population in America. And
00:19:48
Speaker
That means I got the stats here, two million farms in America and there's 2.6 million farmers. So basically all the farmers are doing it alone and there's very few of us. This really cool stat I found is that in 1840, 70% of the US population were farmers. You basically had to be because you had to eat and we didn't have
00:20:15
Speaker
this globalization and industrialization of a food system. And so we've just seen this massive decline. And now that there are systems in place, like Barn to the Door, we can actually grow food, be a profitable business, and sell our products to different farmers. So
00:20:39
Speaker
That's why I sell direct to my customers. I wouldn't do it any other way. I wouldn't farm if I couldn't sell direct to my customers. The other benefits, you get to set your own price. If you're a Tyson chicken farmer, you do not set your own price. Tyson sets your price. They tell you how much they're going to pay you.
00:21:01
Speaker
to raise a broiler and it's probably like 30 cents a broiler is what you're going to get. So you have to raise 3 million broilers that year just to be able to pay your own bills. But with me, I get to check my own pricing because regionally food costs are different. We're in like a touristy kind of town and our feed costs are almost double what I was paying in Virginia for feed.
00:21:31
Speaker
So you need to be able to be flexible and work with the area and the region that you're in. Also, you don't have to grow. Let's take the Tyson farmer again. He has to start with a $3 million warehouse tunnel thing just to start growing for Tyson. But if you wanted to start your own farm, you can manage your growth.
00:21:57
Speaker
by saying, I'm gonna raise a hundred broilers this year and just see how it goes. And I can keep my talent job. And it actually is a way nicer or fluent entry into the farming space than, hey, you need 3 million just to start, okay?
00:22:16
Speaker
I love engaging with my customers. I'm a very social farmer. So I'm like super, super weird. And so engaging customers, one of my favorite things. I actually did the deliveries this morning.
00:22:27
Speaker
for our farm. We had 19 deliveries this week. And so I got to talk to, most of the time we're just dropping the meat in a cooler, but I probably got to talk to seven or eight of my customers today. They gave me feedback on the chicken legs and the steaks and the ground beef. Everyone's ranting and raving about it. And it's a huge emotional boost to my confidence as a grower.
00:22:51
Speaker
because I get to talk to the people who I feed and it's like they're feeding their kids with this stuff. And that's just a really fascinating and encouraging connection that you can make because farming is hard. When you're out there and you're sweating through your like fifth shirt that day, you need encouragement to keep going because most of us are alone in this. And so when I get to see that this lady is feeding her kid the eggs that I grew,
00:23:21
Speaker
And she's saying, thank you so much for doing this and you're growing such amazing stuff. That's what I think of with 98% humidity in July. So the last thing, control your practices. Obviously we're all in this together. We want to be doing regenerative practices. We want to be moving our animals every day and take that Tyson chicken farmer. He's got to do it exactly how they say it.
00:23:45
Speaker
with the feed rations they put in there. But for us in the regenerative space, our practices are we get to pick the feed rations we want, we get to move them every day, we get to interact with the animals, we get to find out what kind of grass they like. It's a way more fulfilling system this way when you're able to sell direct and be a local farm with your own deal.
00:24:10
Speaker
So we're going to go into brand building and how to build your own business that is successful. And there's a lot that goes into it. Let's see what we got here. Okay. Core values, multi-channel marketing, sharing your story. You, when you start your own business, you have to understand that your company is more than just something on paper.
00:24:39
Speaker
you become a brand. And it's usually you, the farmer, that is the first thing that people think of. When they think of Chucktown Acres, they might think about ground beef, but hopefully they think about me and the cows and what we're doing. Then that's how we start to build this brand is the connection to a story that we're telling
00:25:05
Speaker
We're telling the story that, hey, these fields that we're running were old ragged veggie fields that were tilled and sprayed every year for 40 years. They could only grow weeds. And now we've taken them over. And in three years, we have beautiful, lush pasture. And all we did is put chickens and cows on. People will get to know that as when they buy the ground beef, they understand
00:25:34
Speaker
I'm buying into the system of high quality food for my family, but also I want to support someone in some company that actually does something good in the world. You know, I mean, there's so many companies that are known just for their greed and their ability to sell stuff without being helpful to the people, the planet, the environment, the community.
00:26:03
Speaker
And so that's what you want people when they think of your business, they want to think of this is an awesome guy. His ground beef is $3 more than the grocery store, but I know how Jim raises his cows. I might know how the grocery store raises their cows. They're in a feed lot for 90 days. I don't want to support that all support Jim and the highway between the two in that decision is your brand. So.
00:26:32
Speaker
People will understand your values, they need to know your story, and you have to get in front of them. So that's where we come into multi-channel marketing. Rory, do we have a slide for multi-channel marketing?
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah. And we'll kind of do a lot of these. And I was going to jump ahead and really quickly just talk about, cause I know Alex is really familiar with core values and he certainly has them for his business. And this is something that is really important for Barnadore too, but for really any business. And you've probably seen these kind of become more and more of a staple for businesses over the last few years, as people are more interested in where companies stand on things.
00:27:06
Speaker
But so core values are really just what are you about? What are, what's important to your business? And they are really key differentiators. And I was going to hit on Barnadores really quick and then Alex I'll turn it back over to you and you can talk about yours and how you formulated those. But just as an example, we have our like six core values. They all start with H's. I always think it's funny cause I did four H as a kid and now I'm like, now I got six H's.
00:27:30
Speaker
But so these are kind of like layout how we want to work with and support and help farmers and also be successful as a supporting software to what they're doing. And so Alex, I'll turn it back over to you, I guess, and you can walk through yours.
00:27:43
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks. Okay. So we got environment, community, education. So these are the things that I am the most excited about. So because I own my own business, I was able to set up the core values for us that I find the most important, which is really, it's crucial for you when you're starting your own business to set these up. And so that when it's 98 degrees,
00:28:11
Speaker
and you're tired of weed eating fence lines, you can remember these things and say, okay, I'm doing this. I'm not spraying Roundup on these freaking fence lines because I care about X. So the first thing for me was the environment. If I only wanted to get into food because I knew I could use regenerative practices to heal land. And that was,
00:28:40
Speaker
I could heal land, I could create high quality food that can heal people, and I can also create an environment that's beneficial for these animals rather than them being in factories, warehouses, feedlots, crap like that. I wanted my first thing to be ecosystems, regeneration. We've got
00:29:03
Speaker
According to the UN, we got about 50 years left of American soil before it just turns into a desert. So we have to do something now. This is the most important thing that we have to do. So the environment's first. Next is the community because they're the ones who support this business by buying the chicken breast, by buying the sausage, by paying to go on a hayride farm tour.
00:29:31
Speaker
These people need to feel the love. And this one's easy for me because this is my natural bent. I'm a people person. But if you're going to run your own farm, you need someone to support it. And that's your customers. So what we've done is it's a little silly, whatever, but I call our customers the Chup Town family.
00:29:53
Speaker
So if you get one of our newsletters, which I try to send one out every week, haven't done great since I had a newborn six weeks ago. But if you get that, the first thing that you'll see is, Hey, Chuckdown family. Thanks for reading this. It's a way to welcome people in, let them know that I really appreciate them and.
00:30:17
Speaker
They're a part of this. They're in the group. What Polyface did back in Virginia is they actually had a buying club. If you want loyal customers that are going to stick around for a long time, you need to make them feel like they're part of something. So I have the Chucktown family is what I call it. And people seem to really appreciate that it's like we're all in this together.
00:30:43
Speaker
My last thing is I love teaching. This is my selfish one. I am a educator by heart. So I try to do as much food and ag education as.
00:30:58
Speaker
possible. And so most of the time you'll see that on our Instagram and in our newsletters and on these hayrides that we bring people on. I'll bring people into the system. I'll show them how we do it and then I'll tell them about how the food in the grocery store is grown and
00:31:16
Speaker
When you do that, people didn't know that. People don't think about it. You know, they're just thinking, I got four kids. I had baseball and soccer and lacrosse and ballet this week. I just need to feed these animals and move on. So they're just going to go to the grocery store and get the big pack of whatever. But.
00:31:36
Speaker
The thing that you can do that will give them pause in the grocery store is you show them how your animals are raised. You show them how your vegetables are grown, and then you inform them on how that other stuff is grown, and it makes a huge difference in their mindset, they may still go buy the grocery store stuff.
00:31:56
Speaker
but it will give them pause and it will earn you a lot of customers because they will see the value in what you're doing and they'll want to support you. Okay, so this is
00:32:11
Speaker
The best way that you can get your brand in front of people, it's not billboards anymore. It's not cold calls. It's not flyers. It's people are on their phones all day long. And so the whole marketing world is adjusting to how people are living now. And now they have a screen in front of them and there's very affordable ways that you can get in front of them.
00:32:40
Speaker
One of the best pieces of business and marketing advice that I ever got was that you have to remind people that you exist, especially when you're a small business.
Leveraging Social Media and Email Marketing
00:32:53
Speaker
In your mind, you always exist. What you're doing is the most important thing ever. And everyone should remember that you're there, but your customers don't always remember that you exist and they just want to go to Trader Joe's
00:33:09
Speaker
or Whole Foods and go get their stuff and make it easy. So you have to constantly be knocking on the door and reminding people, hey, we're here and you can buy this, you can buy this chicken breast day and we'll bring it to you. We'll make it as easy as possible. So you got to have a good website. It needs to be clean.
00:33:30
Speaker
have happy pictures on there, the good explanations of what you do, why you do it, and what you're selling and how they can get involved. So we've tried to, in Barnador, another plug, they designed our website for us. So they knew all this, how to create an easy, enjoyable website experience.
00:33:54
Speaker
And they built it. I told them what I wanted and they built it for us. And when they've been able to make adjustments along the way, we're farmers. We don't know how to build a website. We know how to move chickens and grow corn and tomatoes. So we need help with websites. Also, social media is an absolute must if you're going to be starting a new business because it's free marketing and you can do a lot of your education.
00:34:24
Speaker
your sales, all your marketing is gonna be your wanna plug in as much as you can in that social media, follow a bunch of other farms that are very popular and you can pretty much just copy whatever they're doing. And that's what we've done and it's working out great because there's 3 billion people on Facebook and Instagram. So you have access
00:34:52
Speaker
to millions and billions of people and it's free. So if you don't have one, you got to get one. I was an anti Instagram guy. I was an anti social media guy before I started Chuck down. Didn't have anything. I didn't exist on the internet. And I immediately found out that if I didn't have a Chuck town account, we were going to fail. So I got over it and I got one and
00:35:22
Speaker
Rory tells me I do a good job on there. I still think that's hilarious because of where I was three years ago. But I ended up now having a lot of fun on, I mostly use Instagram. I have a lot of fun on there now. If you go and follow us, you'll get to watch my videos that I do. And I try to keep it light and fun and educational. The last thing on the online side is the email. You've got to do a newsletter. Yeah. I know most farms are probably doing once a month.
00:35:51
Speaker
I've seen a huge benefit from once a week. Email is a personal invite to information, sales, people feel special. You can do MailChimp now where it will put the person's name at the beginning of the email. And when I get an email like that, even though I know it's a newsletter, I still feel warm and fuzzy inside when I see an email that says, Hey Alex, blah, blah, blah, after that.
00:36:21
Speaker
You have to do an email list. You have to do these newsletters. Just keep people informed about what you're doing. You don't even have to be selling anything, but be educating, be informative, tell people what you're doing, because they don't know what you're doing. Last thing is, oh, the in-person stuff. We have seen a massive increase in our business sales
00:36:49
Speaker
And our brand recognition, since we started doing subscriptions, our website started out as just a la carte. You could go on there. You could buy a pound of ground beef and a dozen eggs with the Yuda. We deliver it. Cool. See, uh, three months from now when you remember to order again, but we've set up subscriptions and the sales are just ridiculous because now we're getting to people.
00:37:17
Speaker
before they think about their groceries for the week, we're actually in their freezer and they can actually come up with their week's meals with the stuff in the freezer already because we do a farmer's choice CSA. I pick what they get every week. It's the same dollar amount. We have a week and every other week in a monthly box. And I just delivered all the monthly boxes today.
00:37:45
Speaker
And the people, the reviews were amazing from the people and they just told me, I would never remember to order, but because you bring it every week and you got my credit card, we want to keep this thing going and they love it. And so we bring them eggs and about seven to eight pounds of meat per month. They blow through it and they're excited for more when it's time for it again. Okay. Oh, subscriptions.
00:38:13
Speaker
So convenience is an arms race out there right now for convenience. Everything is trying to be as easy as possible. Your freaking phone has your credit card already plugged in. So you can go, you can go order whatever you want on Amazon and it takes 30 seconds. So we are having to work against that because not everyone is going to come to the farmer's market. Hardly anyone's going to drive out to your farm because farms are far away from people.
00:38:43
Speaker
So you have to find convenient ways to not only get in front of them, but also there's nothing more convenient than home delivery. You just bring it to you where you already are. I even have one lady that brings, that I bring her order to her work because we bring them during the day. She leaves her trunk unlocked. He has a cooler in her trunk and I put the order in there. So if we weren't doing that,
00:39:09
Speaker
We probably have 10 to 20% of the customers. The revenue that comes from easy do it once subscriptions and it just recurring is changing the game for local farmers. And it's going to allow more and more people to become farmers because it's more profitable for us. It's more flexible for us. If I'm out of sausage this week, I can put steaks in the box. If I'm added chicken breast,
00:39:39
Speaker
I can put sausage in the box. And these subscriptions are usually farmer choice. And so you can choose what goes in there and you're not having to wait on Sally to pick pork chops, steaks, and chicken breasts this week. You can just pick what she gets. And as long as you don't put anything too weird in there, they love it. Don't put the pork fat, don't put chicken feet in there, but put the stuff that people actually like.
00:40:08
Speaker
our farmers markets only six months out of the year. And yeah, I wish it was year round, but it's not most, I dunno, probably 50% of farmers markets, maybe even up to 80% of farmers markets are not open during the entire year. So if you get a subscription, these guys can still get pork chops in January when they would normally just be going to the grocery store to go get their pork chops in January because there's no farmers market.
00:40:39
Speaker
So you do that, you build this loyal network. I've got a few customers that have been on this subscription since day one, when we started it two years ago. And these people will not buy me anywhere else. I actually have not had a customer that wanted to do a la carte orders and be consistent, not a single one. And we don't have thousands of customers every week, but my,
00:41:08
Speaker
only loyal customers that I can always count on to be there are these ones that come from subscriptions. So whether you guys are doing flowers, dog food, fruits, meat, there's a subscription for everything. So find a way
00:41:27
Speaker
to have that passive revenue coming in where people don't have to think about signing up, swiping their card, typing their number in. Find some way that you can offer them value every month, every week, every quarter, and
00:41:45
Speaker
your business will have way more revenue coming in than if you were just trying to sell one pack of chicken legs at a time. Okay. We mostly hit on the delivery thing. The main thing is convenience. You're battling against Amazon. You're battling even now groceries are home delivered. I got a guy that his butcher box for us only because we offered
00:42:14
Speaker
home delivery. If we wouldn't bring it to his house, like ButcherBox does, he'd be sticking with ButcherBox and most of the grocery stores now are doing home delivery. Even freaking Chick Play is doing delivery. So that's the new, that's the new way. And that's what people expect. So if you don't do delivery, you can't find a way to make it work. We haven't, to be honest with you guys, we haven't found a great way to make delivery work.
00:42:44
Speaker
I do it. I pack up my truck. I put the meat in coolers. I drive with bags and I put it in their door. It's not great because I have very important things to do, but the delivery trumps those things. Even though I got Bush hogging to go do a quick books to itemize. I got to mow the lawn. I got to organize the barn. I got to do an oil change on the Gator.
00:43:11
Speaker
I have to do those deliveries or we will lose the customers and we will lose the revenue and you can't run a business without revenue. So you're going to have to adjust to the system that we're in now. And the system is what's the most convenient, what's the easiest thing possible. And so you got to do delivery. You got to find a way to make it work, hire a teenager to do it for you. If you can find one that's reliable.
00:43:40
Speaker
Find a way to do it. Okay. Super important. This is your main, probably your main way that you're going to remind people that you exist. What I do, my goal is to post probably every other day. Yeah. I know there's people out there that post eight times a day and there's people that post up there one times a month. I try to set realistic goals for myself. So I'm trying to do every other day and work my way up to every day, putting something funny,
00:44:09
Speaker
or informative or entertaining in front of people, or even it could just be like, hey guys, we have eggs on sale this week. They're five bucks instead of eight. Boom, done. But you've got to remind people that you're there because Trader Joe's is always in the same spot and it has all the cool
00:44:33
Speaker
you know, chocolates and stuff. And they have that whole chicken aisle and the beef and all that stuff. And people think that's okay quality stuff. So that's what you're competing against the two buck Chuck. So this is what barnadore taught us three E's of social media. And they've actually kind of revolutionized my Instagram game, if you will.
00:45:01
Speaker
because it at least gives you something like a target to shoot for, educate, entertain, e-commerce. So you want to be informing people like, hey, I did a video on why I think we need cows. It may be obvious to most of us, but that's my most popular video ever in three years, why we need cows.
00:45:26
Speaker
And so for me, that's a simple little thing that is obvious to me, but there's so many people that are so disconnected, even just saying, Hey, we need cows because they're going to poop on the ground and eat the grass. It's blowing everybody's mind.
00:45:44
Speaker
So then I try to do a little bit of silly stuff. I definitely could be doing more of that. I lean mostly into e-commerce where I'm telling people like, Hey, here's the monthly box. It's a picture of a bunch of meat and eggs. If you want to sign up, go to our website, or I do education. I need to get into the entertaining funnier side of things, but I still working on that also. So the relationship that people have.
00:46:13
Speaker
with the farmer is so important. We've gotten way more traction online since I started putting my face on the posts. I didn't want to do it for a long time. Very hesitant. I'm not like a very social networking kind of guy, but you know, Instagram and Facebook
00:46:36
Speaker
They got algorithms. If they see a human face, they're going to show it to probably 80% more people. It's just they know we're humans. We want interaction with other humans. We want to see faces and eyeballs and noses. So if you put your face on there while you're holding the ground beef, it's going to be way more impactful to whoever's on the phone watching it than just a picture of the ground beef.
00:47:03
Speaker
So also some of the relationship stuff that I do on there is I'll actually do video series, quick little reels. I just did one on ragweed that we've been fighting here. And at the farmer's market a couple of days ago, I had four people ask me about the ragweed at the farmer's market, which is, which is silly. I would have never imagined that. People really love that kind of stuff. They want to see progress too. Okay.
00:47:32
Speaker
So I've hit on the newsletter pretty hard already. We want it to be fresh, clean. The pictures really help. People love seeing pretty pictures of stuff. To be honest, Barnadore gave me a bunch of these pictures already, but they make a huge difference to the aesthetic of your newsletter. We use MailChimp for ours. We've had great experience on there so far. A bunch of people came to the farmer's market that wouldn't have
00:48:03
Speaker
just because we sent this email out and said, come to the farmer's market today, we got fresh beef that hasn't been frozen yet.
00:48:10
Speaker
We had a bunch of people come out. It actually rained like crazy that day. And people still came out in the rain to the farmer's market. There's tons of add-ons that you can do. Like these, Barna George just started helping me add these buttons to here so people can literally just click on the chicken breast and the eggs down there. And it will take them straight to our website, to the place, the store where they could just buy the eggs right then and there.
00:48:38
Speaker
One thing that I've noticed when doing these emails is you have to have clickable things. If people, you can't just tell them like, Hey, type in chucktownacres.com. You have to make a hyperlink of chuckdownacres.com. If you want them to go, I would probably say, Rory, you might have the stats. I don't know. You'd probably lose about 60 to 70% of the people who would click if there's a click.
00:49:07
Speaker
But if there's not a link that they can just tap with their finger and we're like, nah, I'll type in chuckdownacres.com later. It's a little bit too much work for me to do right now. So you always want to have your brand on. You see our logo up there. You've got pictures. This is all part of.
00:49:25
Speaker
demonstrating your brand for people, you want to try to lodge yourself into their brain the best you can. So show them what you're doing. Show them real pictures of the animals or of the vegetables or whatever you're doing, but always include your logo there. It's on all of our products. When you buy the chicken breasts or whatever, it's our logos on there and the farm name is on there. And it's a very psychological, powerful tool.
00:49:55
Speaker
to lodge yourself into those people's brains because you're upping your odds of them remembering to order from you instead of going to Whole Foods. Anything I missed there, Rory?
00:50:07
Speaker
I don't think so. I think email is just always one that never seems like... I think people always think email is so outdated and we've continued to find over and over that for farmers and for all small businesses, it's just the most effective and cost efficient. Sending emails is free for the most part. It's like one of the most cost effective and best returns on investment is using email marketing.
00:50:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'll add in there. We have the ability for people to order online. So I get a notification when someone orders online. There is a massive difference in the weeks that I send out a newsletter and the amount of orders that come in that week versus the weeks that I don't send out a newsletter because my newborn kept me up till 2 a.m. and I just was too tired to do one.
00:50:54
Speaker
The numbers drop significantly. And so it is so important. Rory and I were talking about this last week. Social media is almost like you're shouting from the rooftops, Hey, I have a farm. We do cool stuff. Anyone listening out there, you can buy it and check out what we're doing. But an email is a personal invitation. Like you wrote a letter to that lady and you delivered it to her door and say, Hey, I wrote this for you.
00:51:24
Speaker
And you're going to see a way bigger impact on your customers because you do a personal thing that goes right to their inbox. And if you can make the thing say, Hey, Bill, or Hey, Sally on there. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're about. It is way more powerful, especially in the revenue.
00:51:47
Speaker
space. If you have a way that people can order online on your online store, it is way more powerful than an Instagram post saying, Hey, we have ground beef in it. Yeah. Email is holding on strong so far. Um, yeah, we talked about in person. It's also incredibly crucial that you show up in front of people in real life. We're humans, even though
00:52:15
Speaker
We're on these dang phones all the time. People have chemical reactions when they see other people and it will help them remember you way more if they have a very pleasant experience in talking to you. You got to be social. You got to be charismatic. You got to get out of your comfort zone. You got to ask people what their name is. And the main way that we do this is at the farmer's market.
00:52:44
Speaker
And then we've been able to add different farm events, especially we do a, you pick strawberry. So for two months out of the year, we're having people on our farm and they see me and they go pick strawberries that I've planted and they can come and buy ground beef and eggs whenever they're done. I'm the one ringing them up. They're making a connection with their farmer.
00:53:13
Speaker
And it's making a lasting impact. I've grown my customer base in a massive way because people get to interact with me in person and they like who they talk to. And this stat is really cool. 90% of people want to buy local. Either if you're a store or a person or a chef or a caterer, they want to buy local. It doesn't mean they can't afford it.
00:53:48
Speaker
You have to connect with those people eye to eye sometimes. The online stuff is crazy important, but if they never see you in person, you're going to see probably a huge influx if you can get in front of people online, but you might not sustain loyal customers if they never meet you, especially if you're the person feeding their family. And that's why I think a lot, we've had a lot of people drop their butcher box.
00:54:10
Speaker
But the desire is there.
00:54:17
Speaker
or their force of nature meats or whatever they were ordering from, they'll quit those and just order our stuff. Probably just because of the interactions I've had with them in person. Community involvement. We do a lot of like volunteer days. We try to find ways to get boots on the ground here on the farm. We want people to have an experience that they're going to remember when they come here and you'll earn a lot more customers.
Community Engagement and Future Plans
00:54:46
Speaker
And they'll, you know, we can go back to brand on this. They're going to remember your brand as when they think of Chucktown acres, they're going to think of a hayride where they pet the goats and ate the best dang strawberries they've ever had. It's going to be a pleasant chemical experience that they can have that they want again. And so maybe when they go into Whole Foods, they'll skip.
00:55:14
Speaker
those strawberries that came from Arizona and they'll wait until they can come out to pick ours again. And you'll win a lot of people that way just by involving them and stuff. Our biggest volunteer day is actually the strawberry planting day. We've actually in the past, we've actually charged people to come and plant strawberries for us. And we got all the people we needed. That was during COVID. So we probably got away with that, but people,
00:55:43
Speaker
want to get their hands dirty. There's the desire growing now to experience local food and farms. We're on an upward trend in popularity as a movement, as a whole right now. So we're always trying to find ways of getting people into what we're doing here on the farm or out in the community or at a farmer's market or something like that. So in person, crazy important. So this kind of recaps everything we've talked about.
00:56:13
Speaker
As far as your brand goes, you're thinking about what people are thinking about when they think of you. When they think of Jim's Acres, they want to have an understanding. Okay, Jim's farm has a mission. They are easy to order from.
00:56:35
Speaker
I want to support them. I really like Jim and the interactions I've had with him and the emails he send out. And I'm constantly reminded because Jim sends me these emails every week that he's doing great stuff and I should keep supporting him. So that's what your brand as a whole, as you develop your business, that's what you want people to think of.
00:57:05
Speaker
I guess it's going pretty good for us so far. We are always trying to improve, but we've seen an awesome reaction from the customers and we've seen an awesome reaction from the land that we're on. So I want to keep educating is the more I do educational stuff, the more I want to do it. So I think there's tons of people out there, you guys that have no idea what the
00:57:34
Speaker
food systems about what modern agriculture is like, how that food ends up in the package in the grocery store. And we need all hands on deck.
00:57:44
Speaker
to educate as many people as possible and to cover the gross sides of this industry. Because the more people, you can show them grass and cows and that's really great. I think the thing that's going to change a lot more minds is when they see a feedlot or when they see a chicken house with the guy carrying in like 50 dead chickens in his hands. That stuff is crazy important and we need to show tons of people
00:58:14
Speaker
the best way to do it and then to remind them there's this really bad way. You know, we don't spend a lot of time on that in my social media or in my newsletters because you want to be sending positive messages out or never again, but a little bit of showing them the dark side. You got to do it and you got to do it with tact, but it's very powerful. So we're learning.
00:58:39
Speaker
As we go, we're educating this land is improving like crazy. I'm only working 75 acres here, but the 75 acres that we're working has just, I bet the value of this land has gone up three, four X since we've been here. And then our business, I'm still a business owner, not just a farmer. So I'm beginning to figure out, I need to hire an admin person. I need to hire a delivery driver and we're,
00:59:09
Speaker
Year three, we're at the point right now where I'm about to make some big decisions this winter on how much staff to hire, how to set up the business to be more efficient. And so when you guys are starting your businesses, you want to make sure that you're flexible in the few, in the first few years.
00:59:33
Speaker
you may work for free for the first three years and not be able to pay yourself. And you need to be okay with that because you're going to be in a discovery phase of what do these people want? What can I sell? What is the demand and how can I do that the most efficient and economical way? And then you really go for it and you hammer that. So we're in,
01:00:01
Speaker
We're right at that point right now for this winter, we're going to be hiring more people, making more changes, building more structures, and we're going to really invest some money that we've made. We're going to invest this money into this business and we're going to really go for it.
01:00:18
Speaker
And think about me this winter, because it's going to be a little scary. This is my dream. And this is what I want to do. And we're living an awesome life here on the farm. And it's time to like really go for it. And I think we've done enough kind of research with our customer base and our land to find out what really works. And now we're going to go for it and try to turn this farm into a real revenue busting machine. So that's where we're headed.
01:00:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to all my ramblings. I want to extend my thanks to the Rodale Institute for including us in their internship programming, and to Alex for joining us for the presentation. Here at Barnador, we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farms like Chucktown Acres. For more information on the Rodale Institute, you can visit RodaleInstitute.org. To find more information on Chucktown Acres, you can follow them on Instagram, at ChucktownAcres.
01:01:14
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.
01:01:28
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in. For more free farm resources, tips, and tactics that are most successful farms use to grow and manage their business, visit barnadore.com slash resources. Also don't forget to subscribe to the Direct Farm podcast to automatically download our weekly episodes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.