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Recap of the 2020 DIRECT Conference!
246 Plays5 years ago
Hear the key takeaways on each of the 4 Levers for Farm Success from the 2020 DIRECT Farm Conference. Full recordings available here: https://www.directfarmconference.com/videos.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Success Levers
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We're going to talk about the four lovers for farm success, quality, brand, price, and convenience. We're going to hear from outside industry experts and producers like you in order to delight customers to save time and to grow your direct sales and business. We're glad you're here.
Virtual Conference and Keynote Insights
00:00:25
Speaker
And this week, I want to share with you an event that we had on Tuesday that also focused on the four levers for farm success, but was the first ever totally free, totally virtual 2020 direct farm conference. And it was such an incredible day. It was about a half day full of speakers. We had keynote sessions and in practice farmers sharing what's worked for them.
00:00:50
Speaker
We partnered with Acres and shared some data on exclusive surveys around the four levers that we sent out and collected from farms across the country. And ultimately, it just turned into this wonderful community moment. We had a hashtag trending on social, which I really encourage you to use as well. If you listen to this podcast or if you go to the recordings page, it's linked in the episode description, you can watch all of the episodes from the conference
00:01:18
Speaker
totally free. You can watch the full recordings and we'd encourage you to use that hashtag direct farm conference. You'll be able to see others who are watching those sessions and engaging and share yourself. So let's dig in.
Quality in Farming and Soil Health
00:01:35
Speaker
The first speaker of the day was Paul Dorrance, and he was our keynote speaker on quality. Hello everyone from beautiful Southern Ohio. My name is Paul Dorrance. He is over at Pastured Providence over in Ohio. He is a grass-fed beef producer who's now transitioning to consulting work. My new vision for Pastured Providence is to encourage and educate and equip both new and seasoned farmers for success in pasture-based livestock.
00:01:59
Speaker
He's also a speaker with Acres, an author, a sustainable agriculture advocate, and he is actually has a new course with Acres USA coming out early August, and that is proven lessons for success in the business of farming. I really recommend you check that out as well.
00:02:18
Speaker
But Paul shared with us how quality has to be the foundation of your farm. And quality has to be seeded, pun intended, through your values, through your stewardship, through your soil health, and then through your products. Whatever your product, ultimately quality must be foundational to our farm businesses. It provides an alternative to fast and cheap. Our food tastes better and is way more nutritious.
00:02:45
Speaker
Our customers are demanding it, and that allows us to take advantage of and provide a market differentiation. But more importantly, I believe we must demand it of ourselves and strive for quality on principle alone.
00:02:58
Speaker
The next speaker we had was our in-practice speaker on quality. And for the in-practice speakers, we wanted to welcome a farmer that's operating right now that has been really successful with all four of the levers clearly, but welcomed them to speak about one. And so for quality, we had Kelsey Duchino, who is the owner of DX Beef. Hello and good day. My Lakota name is Soft Little Breeze Woman.
00:03:22
Speaker
And my English name is Kelsey Duchino. She's also the Natural Resources Director for the Intertribal Agriculture Council. She's a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in North Central South Dakota. And a really wonderful speaker. We've been thrilled to welcome her for webinars in the past. And she brought some insights on quality to the conference, both in terms of your biodiversity, but also in terms of your community engagement and education.
00:03:48
Speaker
We are the generation that our ancestors prayed for and prepared for and thought of as they cared for this landscape. Similarly, we have to do the same thing for the seventh generation to come. The seventh generation is the generation that it's not humanly possible for us to be able to actually meet.
00:04:09
Speaker
But they are one that is going to one day attribute their ability and the resources to our management and our stewardship in our lifetime today. So as we are caring for the land, we're considering how our impact on our day to day activities and our year to year business growth.
00:04:27
Speaker
is going to contribute to that seventh generation's reality.
Marketing Strategies and Online Channels
00:04:31
Speaker
As I mentioned, we also worked with Acres USA on this conference, and they partnered with us to send out a series of surveys, again, on the four levers, so one on quality, brand, price, and convenience, out to hundreds of farms across the country. We got hundreds of responses back, which was wonderful. And the goal there was to really understand what's working and where the opportunities for growth are with farms.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so for the quality survey, some big takeaways were that we found that 64% of respondents marketed their products as organic, sustainable, or regenerative, and that 92% of respondents thought their customers were at least quote unquote somewhat informed as to the quality of their products.
00:05:14
Speaker
Finally, we saw that 64% of respondents reported that online channels were the primary way that customers found their products. And so the story that began to emerge there was that there were certain keywords that customers knew and were searching for on social, online. In order to find those local farm products, there's a certain vocabulary that consumers have as far as
00:05:36
Speaker
what a sustainably produced product is labeled as, but that also those online sources is really where people are looking to find their food and that farms are beginning to understand that they need to be online in order to be found by those consumers searching for those keywords.
Building Brand Awareness on Social Media
00:05:54
Speaker
As the day went on, we moved to our next lever brand.
00:05:59
Speaker
And the keynote speaker for Brand was Nona Jones. Well, hey there, everyone. I'm Nona Jones. She is the head of faith-based partnerships at Facebook. There's actually a lot that communities of faith and farming have in common. They both exist to nourish the community. And so she works all day with communities of faith, churches, mosques, synagogues, working to bring those communities online to keep those really meaningful
00:06:28
Speaker
authentic relationships that happen in both faith and farming communities and bring those online where there's a lot more accessibility. There's a way to engage people throughout the week. And so I want to hear a little bit from Nona. She had some pretty incredible takeaways.
00:06:43
Speaker
What you need to know is although content is king, engagement is emperor. The way that these various social platforms, all of them, the way that they work is they try to ensure that people only see the content that they want to see, which means the algorithms that determine what's called distribution of content, they really determine that distribution based on
00:07:09
Speaker
how those people engage with that content. So if the people like it, if they make a comment, if they tag a friend, if they share it, the algorithm recognizes that, oh, this is content that they may want to see more of. So it's not just about content. It really is about engagement.
00:07:27
Speaker
After Nona's session on brand, we welcomed Valerie Lumen. Hello, this is Valerie Lumen. She and her husband, Jaron, own the grass-fed cattle company in southern Minnesota. And Valerie has done a really incredible job building their social media presence organically.
00:07:43
Speaker
She shared how to think about your brand online. She shared this wonderful anecdote about how people really are paying attention and she realized that when a customer came and kissed her on her cheek after following along with their first batch of pasture raised poultry and wanted to make sure that she was okay after that experience of bringing them to the butcher.
00:08:03
Speaker
But I want to hear from Valerie. She had some really good time-saving techniques for farms because we all know that farming and also building a brand is a lot at once. Here's three ways of how you can continue to build your brand and simplify it a little bit because, at least for me, it seemed a bit overwhelming when I first began. So the first one is the three E's. The three E's are entertainment, education, and e-commerce.
00:08:30
Speaker
I use the three E's to determine what kind of content I'm posting so that I'm not constantly just asking for the sale, right? We want to make sure that we're doing more than just saying, please buy for my business, but instead helping to build that connection and trust with our brand. Some of the big findings from the brand survey and the results we got back in our partnership with Acres
00:08:52
Speaker
was really interesting. We found that while 68% of the farms that responded had a website for their business, 86% of them were at least using social media to build brand online. And of course, we'll talk about this more. We know that all channels are important. So everyone has their own habits on social media, right? But if they find you on Instagram or they find you on Facebook, they also want to go see your website and learn more and enter that storefront. And then also, of course, actually shop.
00:09:21
Speaker
But we also found, interestingly enough, that while 90% of respondents were on Facebook, only 46% were using Instagram. So we saw there just a big opportunity for farms to be engaging on Instagram as well.
Pricing Strategies and Subscription Models
00:09:35
Speaker
The next lever was price. And we had Paul Grieve, who's the CEO of Pasturebird,
00:09:41
Speaker
I think pricing is one of the most important topics around selling farm products. It's often misunderstood. At this point, the largest pastured poultry operation in the country, they're down in Southern California. He came on and he had some pretty challenging insights for a lot of the farms that we're attending, specifically around cost plus pricing.
00:10:00
Speaker
The number one mistake I see in pricing farm products is that we use Cost Plus. He wanted to drive home the point that if you're producing a premium product, that you may be leaving money on the table if you're only calculating in a little bit of profit on top of covering your costs. Farms have to factor in what people are all willing to pay for the quality, the tier of product that they're producing.
00:10:22
Speaker
Don't use cost plus. That doesn't mean don't know your cost. Definitely do. Figure out your costs. Do your accounting. Get your books in order. Hire an accountant if you have to. Much better is look at competitive-based pricing. What I used to do is just go into Whole Foods. And I would literally go in. I'd find the most expensive whole chicken in Whole Foods. Typically, that'd be like a Gap 5.
00:10:44
Speaker
you know, quasi, quasi pasture raised definitely says pasture is on it, whether it really was or not. You know, that's up for debate, but I go and find that and say that was 26, 27 bucks. I basically said, look, um, I know our product is better than that significantly better than that. So I need to be above that.
00:11:04
Speaker
For the in-practice session on price, Tom Bennett from Bennett Farms. Hi, Tom Bennett here. Came on to talk about subscriptions for their farm. And they're doing 12-month farmer's choice subscriptions to bundle boxes of pasture-raised pork and poultry. And they are absolutely killing it. So we sell subscription bundles. Those have been awesome for our farm. So we wanted to bring him on, have him talk about why and how that's worked so well, not only for him, but for his customers as well.
00:11:33
Speaker
It's gotten to the point with subscriptions now where they basically underwrite our entire farming operation and and I did not expect that like at all when we first started with subscriptions. But it is now to where like if everything else dried up if we lost restaurant accounts or all the farmers markets were closed down because of COVID.
00:11:52
Speaker
permanently for an indefinite amount of time. Just our subscription customers that's grown enough now that we can pretty much stay afloat and meet our obligations as far as our farm bills. The survey results that we got back on price that we sent out with Acres USA came back with really good information and also a lot of opportunity for growth.
00:12:15
Speaker
And so 47% of respondents said they were using that cost plus pricing model, which of course is not surprising, but does leave a lot of opportunity for money being left on the table, as we learned from Paul Greve. And that's especially important because 64% of respondents said that they were not going to make a profit this year, or they were unsure if they were going to make a profit this year.
00:12:38
Speaker
Again, that's something that we are here to change and we want to change. A couple of things that we'll dig into future episodes, subscriptions are really challenging this, which is great. Farms with subscriptions are seeing 80 percent revenue certainty, and farms offering direct home delivery are making two times as much as farms that are not. That's based on data that we've seen at Barn to Door. That's not the results of this survey, but it was really interesting to hold up against.
00:13:06
Speaker
and see some of the opportunity that there is for farms to adopt some of these new methods and hopefully bring that 64% number way down. The last one we saw is that 37% of respondents had fewer than 10 items in their store. This is another one of those things that we've seen at Barn to Door that's so effective and we like to compare it to a restaurant menu. So it's the difference between sitting down at a chef owned restaurant where maybe there's
00:13:31
Speaker
you know, a fewer things on the menu versus the Cheesecake Factory where you have this book of things to choose from and it gets overwhelming. And consumers feel the same way when they go into your store and they have 80 items to choose from and fill their cart with as opposed to a farmer's choice produce box or a protein bundle. These things work really well because they're convenient, they're easy one-click options, and customers just want to know that they're supporting a local farm
00:13:59
Speaker
get some good products at a good value, and go.
Convenience in Customer Experience
00:14:02
Speaker
The last lever of the day was convenience. And we do this on purpose because we call convenience the tipping point for customers. You can have the quality products, you can have your well-priced products, and you can have that strong, loyal brand. But if it's not easy for customers to get your food, then they're not gonna find it and they're certainly not going to purchase. And so we call convenience the tipping point for that reason.
00:14:28
Speaker
We welcomed Karen Ha, who is a former exec at Starbucks. She's currently the CEO of Joywell Foods. Hi, my name is Karen Ha, and I'm excited to talk to you about the concept of convenience and why convenience matters for building the customer experience.
00:14:44
Speaker
But she shared some insights on convenience that were really important. She especially wanted to push home the idea of this opportunity, this really desire for local food. She certainly mentioned that during lockdowns earlier this year, she and her family went out of their way as many did to support local businesses and that that desire for those local quality products is so strong. But again, you have to make it easy. Here's what Karen had to say.
00:15:11
Speaker
Convenience is all about meeting consumers where they're at. And what does this mean? It really means about thinking about what their purchasing behaviors are, such as, are they using a credit card? Are they paying cash? Are they using checks? And it's also thinking about how they transact, not only the method, such as cash or credit card, but how they like to shop
00:15:37
Speaker
Is it with their phone? Do they like to shop in person? Are they going to the store? Are they using Instacart, a grocery delivery service? And the reason why this is particularly important now is because of COVID and how people are shopping and managing their day-to-day behaviors has fundamentally changed, has changed in a very short period of time. And while some things are still true,
00:16:04
Speaker
Some people still go to the store. People still need their necessities. While that all might be the case, the reality is everyone is approaching that very differently. We all know that in the world of e-commerce that e-commerce sales is just exploding. Sales made by mobile phone is also exploding.
00:16:25
Speaker
Our last in practice speaker of the day was Jessica Evans. I'm Jessica with Evans Family Farm. She came on to talk about convenience that she's made work for Evans Family Farms. They're in North Carolina and she's previously a public school teacher. She is a first generation farmer and this year launched direct home delivery with some coolers and a minivan and it has worked so well for their farm.
00:16:49
Speaker
The beginning of this year, so the year two of our online sales, we started doing home delivery. We definitely saw that that convenience was key. That was our easiest and most economical way to offer that kind of Amazon Prime experience was to drop a package directly to customers house because 99% of our customers are within a driving distance that we drive to already. She's really kind of this poster child of making direct home delivery work. I think it can sound daunting.
00:17:17
Speaker
But it's really, really feasible for a lot of farms and it's so effective. Again, we're seeing farms offer direct home delivery have two times the revenue as farms who don't. And that's a pretty big deal. So here's what Jessica had to say.
00:17:32
Speaker
So I picked a zip code radius that was kind of in the wholesale route. We were already driving for some of our restaurants that take eggs. And then we just added, we started with those and really haven't had to add much already. So that just exploded. So I still drive our delivery route. Maybe one day I will have this super nice refrigerated truck and a professional driver. But for now I just take all the seats out of my minivan and just make it work with what I have.
00:17:57
Speaker
And it's worked for now because I'm short, so I can't get in and out of a pickup bed all day long. So the minivan works for me and coolers in their ice packs if it's super hot, but the way we package things helps make everything convenient and make it smooth also.
00:18:12
Speaker
The data we got back on convenience in that survey with Acres was really interesting as well. We saw that 61% of respondents were offering their products for sale online, which is great, but that's a lot of farms who aren't online yet, and we know that that's where customers are spending six hours of their day. They're scrolling through social media. They're looking through their email. That's step one for convenience. It's an important place to be.
00:18:35
Speaker
And then we also saw that 22% of respondents offered subscriptions to their farm products, which again is great. We've seen subscriptions do so well. Actually, since we launched subscriptions earlier this year, we've seen 25% of all of the revenue through the platform.
00:18:54
Speaker
be for subscription orders. Customers want subscriptions. Again, huge opportunity for farms to change their model there and really go after that really high demand. Finally, we saw that 48 percent of respondents were offering, quote-unquote, convenient local pickup or home delivery. Convenient here is defined as not pickup at the processor, on-farm pickup, or shipping necessarily.
00:19:20
Speaker
We want to focus on local, convenient options that meet customers' desire to have food on their doorstep, essentially. Although there's a little wiggle room, we found that local pickup can work as well. So after all of that good information, a keynote and in practice session, Acres results on all four levers, again, quality, brand, price, convenience, we wrapped up the day with a couple really exciting announcements from Janelle.
Partnerships and Future Episodes
00:19:50
Speaker
First, we are deepening our partnership with Acres USA and knowing the importance of ongoing education for Farm Selling Direct. We're thrilled to announce all new Barnetador account signups will get a one-year fully paid subscription to Acres USA magazine.
00:20:06
Speaker
giving your farm access to the best quality content from America's largest sustainable agriculture publisher. And if your farm signs up for a Barn to Door account this month in August of 2020, we'll also give your farm a complimentary access to Acre's online course with Paul Dorrance, titled Proven Lessons for Success in the Business of Farming. It's $129 value. We're committed to quality.
00:20:32
Speaker
Next, we're beyond excited to launch the Local Farm Finder to help point customers to you towards local farms that they can purchase from directly. Barn2Door gets millions of page views every month, and we're eager to help invest in growing more demand for your local farm food. We also get tons of requests from buyers across the country asking to buy food from farmers near them. Before, we would just send them a handful of websites from farmers using Barn2Door. Now, your farm will show up automatically.
00:21:01
Speaker
At localfarmfinder.com, buyers will be able to search by their zip code and product type to discover local farmers who use Barn to Door to sell online. We'll slowly start spending advertising dollars as well to direct buyers to localfarmfinder.com to discover their local farmers. The goal is to drive more traffic to you, to your website, to your store, to your brand.
00:21:26
Speaker
This should over time direct more and more buyers to find and buy from you. They're local farmers where it's easy for them to one-click shop from your farm. Finally, we're excited to keep all this fantastic direct knowledge and insights on the four levers going with our new Direct Farm Podcast. Podcast really can be the gift that keeps giving and in this case becomes a trove of resources for farms to be successful.
00:21:51
Speaker
Sign up today to get podcast downloads regularly. Dive more in depth on all four levers. Hear from successful farms. Learn their best practices and tactics. We will invite industry experts outside farming on building your brand, leveraging social media, and building a loyal audience to support your farm business. All of these resources are free online.
00:22:14
Speaker
All right, you heard Janelle announce a couple pretty exciting things there. The first is this podcast, which you know about because you are listening to it, but go ahead and subscribe. You'll get updates for new episodes each week. And if you enjoyed hearing about those keynotes today, we're gonna go in depth on each of those. So we're gonna talk about quality, brand, price, and convenience over the next four weeks, share those talks with you, and break them down a little bit. So you'll definitely wanna stay tuned.
00:22:42
Speaker
The next announcement she made was about that local farm finder. And you can go to localfarmfinder.com and type in your zip code and see farms that are selling direct near you for purchase online. And this works across the country. So you can send local farm finder to your relatives, your friends, your family elsewhere, and they'll be able to find farms as well. So go check it out, share it. We are so excited to make it one step easier for customers to find a farm selling direct.
00:23:12
Speaker
All right, we hope you enjoyed today's episode. Again, we are gonna go in depth on each of those levers over the next four weeks. So we'll talk to you again next week. Stay strong, stay healthy.