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From Homestead to a Growing Farm Business
675 Plays7 months ago
In this week's episode, Janelle talks with Rachel Shenk of Shenk Family Farm. Shenk Family Farm in North Carolina began their protein operation in 2016, turning it into a business the next year. With the help of automated software, successful marketing efforts and convenient, local fulfillments, the Farm has scaled to a 6-figure operation.
To find more Farm resources, check out: https://www.barn2door.com/resources
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Transcript
Introduction to Independent Farming Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go-to podcast for do-it-yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn to Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person. Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
00:00:43
Speaker
Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast.
Barn to Door's Business Solutions
00:00:45
Speaker
I'm Janelle, CEO of Barn to Door and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners may be aware, Barn to Door offers an all in one business solution for farmers selling direct online and in person. In today's conversation, we'll get into the transition into farming and how this newer farm has found success.
Rachel Schink's Farming Journey
00:01:04
Speaker
Today I'm happy to welcome back Rachel Schink of Schink Family Farm in North Carolina. Rachel is part of our farm advisor network and has worked with us for almost four years now. And since becoming an advisor last year, she shared advice with farmers across the country looking to grow their business.
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm excited to talk to Rachel about the process of starting a new farm with her husband, Jo. The hardships and what she would tell herself looking back on the past couple of years since starting the farm in 2017. We always love the retrospective, don't we? Well, welcome, Rachel. It's easy to get in the weeds, but it's good to reflect. It is. It's good to pull back and be like, what have I learned? What would I do different? And all those things. And of course, all the best advice is that retrospective hindsight, I think. For sure.
00:01:50
Speaker
That's good. Well, just so the listeners are aware, can you please share with us, tell us about your farm. We said it was North Carolina. So beyond that, just give us a good sense of your farm, what you do farm, the size of your farm, who you generally serve as customers, and we can take it from there.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Thanks so much for having us to know. But like you said, yeah, we're in eastern North Carolina. So we're just about half an hour from the beach pasture based livestock farm, which has been interesting because land here is getting bought up for developments because we're so close to the beach. We were able to find the acres to lease from actually his grandpa's land. He farmed it. And so he wanted to keep it for farming. And so
00:02:30
Speaker
We were lucky enough to be able to lease it long-term. Oh, that's awesome. I'm so happy to hear that. The land grab is real, so I appreciate that. It is. The struggle took us a couple years to find it. We do chicken, pork, we do beef from a partner farm, but we are going to have our own beef next year. We do Thanksgiving turkeys, fresh eggs, and various products made with our lard. So some soaps, balms, candles. My husband manages the day-to-day at the farm.
00:02:58
Speaker
He cares for the animals, the land, and I'm mostly responsible, well, for the kids. But then also the sales and marketing side of the business. And we got Mason, he's six. We just started homeschooling this year and Daisy, she's two. And we really started the farm for
Starting and Scaling the Farm Business
00:03:12
Speaker
them. They weren't born yet when we started thinking about the farm, but it was back in 2016, we've been married about four years. We started to consider what raising a family would look like, how we wanted to raise a family. And my husband Joe just felt really strongly. He didn't want to work full time away from home.
00:03:27
Speaker
He grew up on his uncle's farm and some other farms. He loved the lifestyle, being outside, doing hard purposeful work, getting to feed people. So we kind of started just on a super small scale in our backyard. We were on half an acre. But yeah, we really just wanted something that we could bring our kids alongside us.
00:03:43
Speaker
to do, to work together as a family, providing food for people. We had no idea in the beginning that it would become a business. That's how it started. We had 40 meat birds and five laying hens in the backyard. We gave it away to friends and family. They were like, this is amazing. Y'all should start a business. And we were like, ah, that's terrifying. So it took us a few years. But we started, so that was in the fall 2016.
00:04:08
Speaker
Of 2016. Okay. That was the fall of 2016. And then in the winter of 2017, the beginning of that year is when we established it as a business. Okay. So that's not too much time later. Like you did it because lifestyle, how you wanted to raise your kids as a family. But at that time you were just like, we just want this experience. You weren't thinking business.
00:04:29
Speaker
Yes. Yep. Oh, interesting. And so then you're like, wait a minute, we could do this. Did you both work off-farm, like off-farm jobs?
00:04:38
Speaker
Yep, so my husband did construction and then I worked at our church office doing administrative stuff, just anything and everything. So I was only about 30 hours a week and he was regular full time, like 40 hours a week. So we were just doing it on the side. And then right after we established the business, I found Alice pregnant with our first kiddo, Mason. And I knew that once he was born, I didn't want to keep working.
Impact of COVID-19 on Farm Operations
00:05:00
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:01
Speaker
And so, yeah, I kind of worked out perfect that I could kind of step back from my job there and focus on the farm. Well, honestly, that's a myth. When you have kids, you work more. You're just not paid for it. You're just not paid for it.
00:05:16
Speaker
It's like, it's 24 seven. It's worth every minute of it. Yeah. Oh, it is. It's been such a joy. So our farm has always been on lease land away from our home. And so I remember taking them in the car seat to do like farm chores when Joe was still at work and he just tagged along for the ride.
00:05:34
Speaker
It was a lot easier when we started walking. Yes, I definitely can see how that would be true. And yet fortunately, out on a farm can be a great place once they do start walking. Oh, for sure. That is fantastic. So when Mason was born, were you then really quote unquote full time farming?
00:05:53
Speaker
And of course full-time parenting. Yes. So I was, but my husband continued to work until 2020. So we just did chicken and eggs for the first three years. We doubled production every year. And then 2020 COVID happened. We started working with y'all because we needed an online store presence.
00:06:10
Speaker
That's when my husband was able to step away from construction. So we were both on farm. We also added pasture pork that year too. So that was perfect timing with the COVID stuff. And that's when we really started to lean into subscriptions, which Barnadore was instrumental.
00:06:27
Speaker
for. Subscriptions has always been kind of the backbone. So when we started, literally, people, how many chickens do you want per month? How many? So that was our subscription. But yeah, and then in 2021, we started partnering with a local grass fed beef farm, because we knew it was a little razor on beef. But that was a huge undertaking that we weren't ready for. Yeah, good. You're kind of learning with somebody else, like right in front of you before you take it on yourself, I suspect.
00:06:51
Speaker
So we learned a lot from him and from some other farmers. And yeah, we had someone else tell us another farm that was like, if you can get a product that's ready to sell and learn how to market, that it would be a way to ease into a new enterprise instead of all of a sudden you're like managing the animals and managing the marketing and the sales like all at once. So that was really, really good advice that served our business. I'm writing that down because we're going to repeat that one at the end. That one's just too good. And now people are like, what did you just say?
Strategies for Marketing and Customer Engagement
00:07:20
Speaker
You have to wait till the end to hear it again.
00:07:22
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So I love that you actually layered, well layered. Now I'm really pushing on the puns, aren't I? Layered in, obviously starting with chicken layers for all the people who didn't catch that. Maybe not obvious pun. So you started with the chickens and the eggs. Yes. And you started it as a hobby and you're like, wow, this works. People like it.
00:07:43
Speaker
And then a couple of years later, you really started pork at the same time your husband was coming full time to the farm. Okay. And then now we're talking two, three years later, you're thinking it's almost time to add the beef. I would suspect you might do it that way again instead of all at once. Or would you change anything about how you added in products at all? This is the advice moment for you on anybody thinking about these things.
00:08:09
Speaker
I would not, I would not change that. I think that was very sustainable. Like we definitely had our points of overwhelm and burnout and all those things, but it was never to the point where we're like, we're quitting the farm. Cause we see a lot of farms do that. Like they go all in.
00:08:25
Speaker
All at once. And then they're trying to manage like 10 different enterprises. And obviously when you're starting something new, it takes a while to work out the kink. And so it's really, it's easy to get overwhelmed fast. So it was really nice to start small and get really good at something before we added something new. Yeah. No, that's not everyone's story, but for us, I would not change that at all.
00:08:45
Speaker
Honestly, it might not be everyone's story, but I've heard that overwhelmingly from farmers that we've talked to and I talked to about starting a farm and even expanding a farm really, but it is get good at something or get good at as much as you can handle first before, because the learning curve takes more time and mistakes and learning. But once you get it down and it's like routine to do, you've got some experience under your belt.
00:09:11
Speaker
you have to maybe think about it a little less. It's sort of like learning to make bread from scratch, but once you've done it enough times, you know, at that point, it's almost just therapeutic. You just know how to do those things. It's not always like that. You have to learn, learn, learn at the front end.
00:09:25
Speaker
I don't think I realized the learning curve was so high and we'd never, we never said, we never had a perfect plan. Like, okay, we're going to do this enterprise for this many years. And you know, it just kind of worked out. We didn't realize the learning curve, not only for raising the animals, but also like marketing everything. Like that was a whole nother thing that like we'd consider when we first started.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah. It's fun when things go right. Like that really went right for you in terms of getting good at something, adding more, getting good at something, adding more. And you ended up probably thanks to Mason. You ended up starting like your full time first and then eventually your husband was able to join you at the right time. That sounds like a lot went right. Yes. So on the other side of it, what went wrong? Yeah. Yeah. Um,
00:10:15
Speaker
So money. That's not even fair. That's too big of a question. Let me back up. I mean, I have a good answer. Okay. I mean, that came to mind. So, so yeah, like, because marketing was just not even on a radar, like so many people tell us like, Oh my gosh, your stuff is just gonna, it's gonna sell itself. Just show up to the market. Bring everything you have. You'll sell out.
00:10:41
Speaker
So we took their advice and we showed up to the farmer's market with 80 fresh whole chickens and we sold two. Oh no. You're probably making a lot of people feel really good right now. Like, okay. They've made it their legitimate farm as a business and they started with selling two of 80. Okay. We can, we can do this too. Like I forgot a price sign. We weren't on social media. We didn't have an email list. I think the only people that knew we were going to be there were like,
00:11:11
Speaker
two friends and my mom and dad, we were naive. We didn't know what we were doing. Yeah. So you're sort of saying if you just show up, that's probably not enough. You actually have to do the exercise of marketing. And if you were to identify, I would say three or four sort of top things you would recommend, if you're going to do marketing, here's what you need to do. What would those three or four things be?
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, so you mean like before you're actually ready to sell the product as you're preparing for that. I will take both answers. I think, like the moment we got the baby chicks, I would have started a social media page been sharing about that, sharing about our farm journey.
00:11:51
Speaker
building an email list, maybe going to local CrossFit gyms to share about our farm and share what we will have eventually, just like starting to build those relationships, getting the word out. Yeah, definitely email lists because I didn't feel like it was necessary because I'm like, I don't have anything to sell. Even just like it was once a month just to say, here's where we are for the farm. Here's what we're working on this week. Here's what we're excited for in the months ahead. This is when we think we'll have chicken available and just kind of bringing people into the farm journey.
00:12:21
Speaker
not anything I think that would have been huge and I think maybe would have sold out our first farmer's market I don't know but maybe you would have I love that it's
Dividing Responsibilities and Building Community
00:12:30
Speaker
not like you can just show up and say we're ready yeah and everybody's like what or they forgot to show up because they didn't know so you're saying hey I'm gonna tell you a lot of times ahead of time like we just got the chicks the chicks are growing look at these beautiful eggs or maybe you have meat birds too etc but you're sort of giving them multiple reminders well in advance um yeah
00:12:50
Speaker
That's really a good idea. Yeah, I think that would have helped. And then email list, you said. That was a big one. You said social media and email list. Is there anything else?
00:13:03
Speaker
I think those are the big things. Yeah. At least we're in like a small town. And I think that in person word of mouth is huge as well. So going to like a homeschool co-op or across the gym somewhere where our ideal customer would be, even if they weren't there, like they at least would know about us and then they could share.
00:13:21
Speaker
with their friends that they might think would be interested. Cause I think in person, at least in our area goes a long way. Because also with meat, I think with produce, you get to display your beautiful produce and people look at it and they're like, it's beautiful. Yes, I want that. But with meat, I feel like people need to know you because. Cause meat's not pretty. And meat's not pretty. It's in like a cooler and it's frozen and it's not like beautiful to look at. So we really had to build that trust with people before they were able to spend $30 on a chicken. So.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yes. So relationship building. That's a big, big one. And social media, email, and in-person are sort of the trifecta, it sounds like, to get that done. How often do you email? But this is always curious, because I'm hearing trends on this one. So in the beginning, just once a month, maybe. But now we try and do at least once a week.
00:14:13
Speaker
And I try and do 75% of those strictly relationship building. So like sharing recipes, sharing farm stories, sharing education, what all the egg labels at the store mean. Those kinds of things that our customers would be interested in. And I always have a link to the online store and I always have our schedule, but I try not to just send emails like that are salesy because I feel like those are easy for people to just delete and not read.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah so so yeah we're once a week has been our sweet spot because we're year-round most of our products are around and we sell every week and so amazing yeah amazing okay that is very helpful I appreciate that. The other thing is as you mentioned in person
00:14:54
Speaker
A lot of farmers probably would think, oh, in person, it's a farmer's market. But you mentioned, I think, a CrossFit gym and a homeschool co-op, which are probably great ideas. So if I'm a farmer listening to this, thinking about getting started, ideally they're small towns near most farmers, frankly. If they were to do that, are they going to call them? Are they going to email? Are they using them as a pickup location or are they doing a prezo or putting up flyers? How do you go about doing that if you're a new farmer?
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think every farmer has their sweet spot, their way of doing things. What worked for us is I would either go in person or do a phone call and just say, Hey, we'd love to share about our farm, whether you'd be interested in being a pickup location or not. We think.
00:15:40
Speaker
that our farm could serve your people well. We'd love to give you product for your family to share and enjoy for free. Oh, that's nice. And then, yeah, we'd love to just be able to share with your people for like 10 minutes during your CrossFit open gym or whatever, you know. And that was great to just start. We never use them as a pickup location. It just didn't work out like with the frozen me weren't coming to the gym every day.
00:16:03
Speaker
But we had a pickup that was like two minutes from their gym. And so it was perfect. And we could say, Hey, we deliver every month or every week on this day at this time to this location. Yeah. And yeah, try to make it really easy and convenient for people. So we still don't offer home delivery. That's something that we are considering doing in the future, but we have been able to sell everything we need to do and just pick up locations, farmers markets. So we haven't added that yet.
00:16:30
Speaker
But I think that that could be another huge thing. I mean, our farm is not in the middle of nowhere. We're like 20 minutes from a couple. Lovely. I mean, not big towns, but bigger than we're
Efficiency in Farm Management and Sales
00:16:40
Speaker
in. Enough people that you need. But if you're in the middle of nowhere, I think home delivery would be, I mean, people love that convenience for sure. Yeah. And it's more efficient than people realize sometimes, honestly. We have some farmers that are just like, boom, boom, boom. And it goes pretty quick because they're focused geographically.
00:16:57
Speaker
So your pickup locations are always a farmer market or is it some other locations as well? Do you have other partner businesses?
00:17:06
Speaker
Yes. So we do pickups at farmer's markets and then we have a mobile farm store. So we got a grant for a dealer that we have chest freezers in. We set that up during the week at two days, same day, same time. So like it's almost like a meetup pickup. Yes. And it's unintended. That's another fun meetup. So people can shop in person or that's like a pickup location. We just set it up for two hours at a local shop that we put every Thursday at five, we deliver.
00:17:34
Speaker
borders to them and people pick up just from us in the parking lot. We don't take it into the store or anything. And then we'd have a self-serve freezer at our home. So in our garage we have it set up that is labeled by their name. The eggs are in the bottom and they can just come at their convenience on a few days a week and pick up. That's actually our most popular one just because people's lives are crazy and we are kind of in the middle of lots of people's commutes to and from work.
00:18:03
Speaker
traffic pattern. Love it. Yes, if they can make that part of the routine, that's a big deal.
00:18:09
Speaker
That's fabulous. I used to man those hours, but then like you'd talk to someone for half an hour and it's like, I've got to go make dinner and do other farm things. And we're like, okay, I can't have a relationship in person with every single customer. Like we've got to streamline this with our email list. And yes, I'm going to do in-person stuff, but I didn't have the capacity to stop and talk with every single person. I know that's so sweet. No, that's good. You even have to streamline and consolidate the relationship building, which is fair.
00:18:38
Speaker
when you're also trying to run a farm and a family and everything else in between. And that makes a ton of sense. I didn't like it in the beginning, but as a business and then like we wanted to scale, it was necessary. And I just had to come to terms with that and set boundaries for myself. And that's actually, I'm so excited that you just use the word scale. Cause literally that's on my short list of things to ask you about. So scaling the farm, because obviously when it's sort of a hobby at the very, very beginning,
00:19:05
Speaker
Or if you're just asking, like you said at the beginning, you're just like, hey, how many chickens do you want? And you could manage that in that way. But if you need to grow it as a business and get to a certain scale where you're making enough money to pay the bills and have it make sense and have it be a full-time enterprise, not without off-farm jobs.
00:19:23
Speaker
you need to build in efficiencies into your operations in order to raise and grow enough to sell and make that make sense. Did you make any mistakes on the scaling? Let's talk about that first and then we'll flip it and talk about some of the successful things you've done to scale.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So I think in the beginning, I wanted to please everybody. I was like, Oh, she's got four kids. I need to make sure her chickens like really big or this person, they have a big family. So they're chuck roast. I need to make sure is on the bigger side. I was trying to customize everybody's order. It was not sustainable.
00:20:00
Speaker
frustrated and resentful and like all those things. And I just had to let it go. And so at this point, our subscriptions are all farmer's choice and they're not customizable. The only thing we'll do is if you don't like spicy sausage, we will just do mild. Like we can do that. But everything else, I had someone that's like, I just want bacon and boneless chicken breasts. And I'm like, I can't do that.
00:20:21
Speaker
So we have a great online store, we order all the cart that I think is going to serve you well. And I just kept telling people that because in the beginning I tried to make the subscriptions fit everyone and our subscription is honestly not for everyone. So I just had to be okay with that. Yeah, that's a good point. I've actually heard more and more firms say that too, which you're not going to serve 100 out of 100 customers. And you shouldn't try to because you'll be miserable doing so.
00:20:50
Speaker
What I found when I was customizing, none of those people lasted. They would be on for like three or four months and I would bend over backwards to make it work. And then they ended up saying, Hey, this isn't working for me anyway. They were just not an ideal customer for the subscription. And at the end of the day, sometimes the hardest ones to please aren't ones that can ever be pleased. Right. And that's okay to let them go. They can go be somebody else's customer, I guess. Yeah.
00:21:14
Speaker
I appreciate that. Most customers and buyers love their farmer's choice subscription. Let's go. How often do you do subscriptions? Cause the subscriptions is something that you mentioned at the beginning as a game changer for your business. How often do you do those? What does that look like? And why is it such a big deal?
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah. So all of our sales, we used to do a little bit wholesale. Now we just do retail direct to consumer. Like that's it. We don't do any wholesale, anything like that. We do offer bulk, like half big and that kind of thing, but really just to families. It gives us peace of mind. So we noticed like with the farmer's markets in particular, after doing them for, yeah, we've been doing them eight years at this point, there's literally no trends. It could be pouring down rain and we'd have a better sales day than like a beautiful sunny day.
00:21:59
Speaker
And we would have random really low days and random really high days. We kind of depend on that to be consistent. And so the subscription has been like the backbone really of the farm. Like it's probably a third of our sales that are guaranteed every month. I plan out the whole year in advance of what's going to be in them. And so it's just, it's something that is streamlined and it's easy and it's guaranteed. It brings us peace of mind and we can count on it.
00:22:26
Speaker
And so I would say any new farmer starting out as soon as you can start subscription and start it and don't worry about like, Oh, I'm scared. I won't have enough. Just start. People have so much grace. Just start. And then if you have to adjust and tweak or even cancel it for a couple months and restart it.
00:22:41
Speaker
People will be totally fine with that. We've had to make so many changes with our farms. Just the way we sell or which farmers markets we're going to be at or whatever it is and people, or even last year we stepped back from farmers markets completely for like nine months and our sales didn't go down. And so our customers just followed us with wherever we were going because we had built up that email list. We were clearly communicating.
00:23:05
Speaker
giving them a heads up on things we had built that trust with them so they were like hey wherever you go to sell we'll make it happen and so that's been yeah huge realizing there's no one right or wrong way to do it yeah and i love that you said the customers will have grace right but i also think
00:23:23
Speaker
job well done in building trustful relationships with those customers, right? I think if there's a huge takeaway, I just took it was you said, I built up our customer list, your email list with customers, and they followed you. If you went to different farmers markets, or if you pulled back and said, Hey, we're just going to do pickup locations for nine months, they followed you because I mean, I just want to like pause and like
00:23:46
Speaker
think into that because I think there's farmers that are afraid to leave a farmers market or afraid to make a change like what you're saying and you're saying no like you're going to have to make all the changes and you should because you don't want to get into a situation where you're fatigued you're frustrated you're bending over backwards something's not
00:24:05
Speaker
working also for you as the farmer. But if you've built those customer relationships through regular email especially, then they're connected to you, done. They will follow you at the pickup location change, at the farm market change, if you try door-to-door delivery, or if you have your stay on the side of the road. That's very powerful for you as a business owner to know that you have really loyal customers and can do what you need to do to have a successful business too.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's been huge knowing that it's okay to adapt and change as seasons change, as the farm changes, our family changes. It's okay to be flexible as long as you're clearly communicating and you're giving, like, yeah, they're going to want to support you with whatever you do.
00:24:52
Speaker
That's amazing. That's awesome. And then back to sort of the scale question. It sounds like subscriptions made a big difference. Are there any other things
Financial Planning and Use of Technology
00:25:00
Speaker
that come to mind that worked well for your farm in terms of just scaling, getting the business bigger, but not overtaxing yourself on the work, like trying to be more efficient so that you could get bigger?
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, I remember at one point just like making a list of everything that stressed me out and trying to address them one at a time. Obviously you're not going to solve all your problems all at once, but I used to think I could do that. I just write them all down, solve them, like just get them done with and it doesn't work that way. But I remember our pickup locations. We would sit there for an hour for people. Cause I was like, Oh, I thought I have to have this long range. You know, people are busy. I need to give people a long range of pickup time. And I realized.
00:25:42
Speaker
that I didn't need to do that. So now I don't even do a range anymore. I say every Thursday at five, we're going to deliver orders. Some people show up early, some people show up 15 minutes late. So we're there probably 20, 30 minutes still, but it is so much nicer because even an hour, people still show up early or they come after the hour. And so we cut that and we just said a certain time.
00:26:04
Speaker
for those pick-ups. That was huge. And then just developing systems for things like keeping our freezer organized, having a system for that, putting time on the schedule after all of our subscriptions are packed and out. The freezers are a disaster. And so just putting that on our schedule, like organized freezers for two hours every single month after subscriptions are out to keep everything organized and efficient. It makes
00:26:30
Speaker
packing orders the next time so much easier. Making notes of all the things that are stressful or overwhelming and figuring out you can take small actionable steps to get it to be less stressful and to get it working more efficiently.
00:26:46
Speaker
That takes time. Yeah, this is our eighth year and sometimes we still don't feel like we know what we're doing for some things, but we've grown a lot. When we look to where we were and where we are now, we're like, oh wow, we've come a long way. But then we're like, we still have a long way to go too. So you never stop learning.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate that. You started on half an acre. What does that look like now? You said you had at least 50 acres. Yeah, so now we're on 50. 20 acres of field and 30 acres of woods. When we first started, we were not using all of it, but at this point, yeah, we're like, especially starting the cattle and we're just doing grass. We are realizing we're quickly running out of space, so we're probably going to have to find some more adjacent land, hopefully.
00:27:26
Speaker
here soon to be able to keep growing the herd. The cows are our favorite. They're so low maintenance. Oh. All the other animals. They just need water and minerals and grass and it's great.
00:27:39
Speaker
that's amazing you have started cows now so because you said you yes okay we got breeding stock two falls ago but the cows weren't born until last may and these okay about three years to grow out so yeah the end of next year we should have our first beef available so exciting so exciting that's amazing i love hearing it and then you have little helpers too right
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah. Mason. And then how old is Daisy? Mason is six and Daisy is two. So Mason actually is helpful. He's helped build fence. He helps move chickens. He's helped like label stuff. He helps Joe with whatever. Sometimes he just hangs out with Joe and plays. And then when Joe gets to a point in a project where Mason can help, he'll bring him over to help. And then Daisy, she doesn't really help with a whole lot at this point. She, we just say she's our comedic relief. Oh, I love that he's so real, right?
00:28:33
Speaker
Yeah, we'll have pigs get out or whatever is stressful that day. And then we'll just look at Daisy in her own little world, picking dandelions and blowing them, but they're blowing back on her face and she's trying to get them out of her mouth. And it makes you forget about all the stress. You realize, okay, this is just light and momentary. This is stressful this day, but it's going to get better. Not like this. Yeah. You have more important things to worry about, like getting dandelion seed out of your mouth.
00:29:01
Speaker
I love that. I love that. I think comedic relief has got to be somewhere on the like good advice for farmers list for sure. Yeah. Whether it's a kid or just a friend that keeps you laughing that just, yeah. Even your animals, I suspect make you giggle. Hello. Just sit in the field and watch the animals. And that is so relaxing and funny. Just watching the chickens run has always been funny for me. Chickens are fabulous. Well, they all have so many personalities, don't they?
00:29:30
Speaker
It's great. Okay, so farming side of farming, scaling the business, you've learned a ton along the way. You mentioned the word, sort of the business side of farming at the very beginning of our call. So when you're thinking about scaling and being successful as a farmer, obviously, you've been at it, like you said, now for eight years.
00:29:50
Speaker
Was the business side of farming and what you were in charge of because you are owning your own business, not just your own farm. It is also your own business. Was there anything surprising about that? Surprising or any advice that you would have around the business side of farming? Yeah, we definitely romanticized farming and we thought it would just be like
00:30:08
Speaker
beautiful picture X thing. Like we get to raise the animals and sell it to our community. We did not realize how hard running a business was and like knowing your numbers and knowing your costs and tracking everything. We did not do that well for the first probably three or four years. We did track everything for taxes and stuff, but we weren't breaking down how much of the percentage of the cost of the tractor goes to this enterprise and this one and like tracking our labor and that kind of thing. Like once we started doing that and realizing the true cost
00:30:35
Speaker
of our products. Like, holy moly, we need to raise our prices because we're actually making negative money. And so, I mean, that is a huge thing. If we could start over the farm again, we would have tracked religiously, we would attract our time. We would have met with other farmers that were down the road from us to learn from them, like Bonadore has been amazing without just the connect groups and the connect sessions, being able to ask farmers down the road from you practical questions, because when you
00:31:01
Speaker
first start unless you take in a business course it's really hard to learn and i would suggest that if you have an opportunity to take a business course that would be awesome because we were not skilled in that area and we had to learn on the fly which was stressful we still do our own taxes my husband enjoys it i think he's crazy but now that we like know how to track everything it makes it simpler but yeah now we can look at everything and know our costs and know what
00:31:25
Speaker
profit margin we have and like where we need to make things more efficient or cut costs or raise our prices or whatever and be confident in those numbers. Because in the beginning, we weren't confident in those numbers. We're like, we're charging the right price, but we're not really sure. Knowing your numbers from the beginning is a game changer. I love that because I'm actually technically supposed to ask advice for farmers in their first year of farming and you just started to crack that already. So one of those was learn from other farmers.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yes. And you mentioned Connect Sessions, which you host, which is awesome. So in case anybody's listening and wants to know what the heck we're talking about, Connect Sessions are essentially office hours. Like Rachel, for example, is one of a number of farms that we work with that hosts office hours for other farmers.
00:32:11
Speaker
And so they can come into those office hours and ask a gazillion questions and get advice and shoot around ideas, learn from one another, et cetera. And I want to get back to that because I'm sure you have some really interesting feedback on some trends you hear there. So if you don't have somebody down the road, which hopefully you do, right, farmers, where can you find them? And in the case of, if you work with Barn to Door, you can find them in office hours.
00:32:35
Speaker
which can be great because you can also, hey, I'm in dairy or I do microgreens or I do produce. I can maybe talk to the same type of farmer or to your point down the road or at the farmer's market, like talk to other farmers and find them. And then the second one was track everything religiously. If somebody's just getting started doing that, how do they do that? I would think that would be overwhelming. Yeah, it was. So we just, we keep it simple. We tried the self-employed, uh,
00:33:02
Speaker
Can't remember. There was something online that we tried. Google sheets has been the best for us. Yeah. Make it exactly what we need to. We can break it up by enterprise, break it up by tax. Yeah. For the schedule F that we have to do being self-employed, everything's there. And I would just say we actually had another farmer that was gracious enough to share her Excel sheets with us. So we could kind of like take it, make a copy of it for what we needed to be able to track everything. So we have everything broken up by enterprise.
00:33:32
Speaker
and by month. And then we also have the overhead. That's all encompassing. So we look at what percentage of our revenue comes from chicken, pork, beef, and then we have the percentage and we assign like the barn to door cost to like that percentage to each of the enterprises. So that cost is being covered. That would easily be like, well, how do we cover that cost? Like, I don't know. I just didn't know how numbers worked. And I'm still not a numbers person. Joe, my husband is
00:33:57
Speaker
much more skilled in that area but just making sure that yeah all your costs is covered like the tractor and the tractor repairs and the seed and all the things that like could be attributed over your whole farm not just like one enterprise and making sure it's broken up so all the costs are covered.
00:34:14
Speaker
Farmers are really generous with their knowledge. We reached out to some people on Instagram and just said, Hey, can I have your number? Can I call you for like 20 minutes while you're on the way to the butcher or whatever, just to pick your brain? Never been told no, like farmers. Yeah. They love to share their knowledge and share their mistakes too. Like I've noticed farmers are just really good at being vulnerable. I feel like about what they did wrong and how you can learn from them. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:41
Speaker
But such good information and you need to always be gathering that right to make good decisions. I appreciate that. And then this sounds like such a plug. It's not meant to be, but obviously Barn to Door, literally we build software for farmers to run their business. If you were talking to a newer farmer, what would you tell them early on, especially was the most useful parts of using something like Barn to Door to hopefully make business more efficient. What was the most helpful to you? Was it time savings? Was it tracking certain things?
00:35:10
Speaker
for share time savings. And if I could go back and get Barnard door from when we started, I 100% would do that because building a website was part of the cost. And at that point.
00:35:18
Speaker
When we got on with barn to door, we already had our website built, but I took, gosh, I don't even know, probably like 30 hours trying to figure out how to build that. So it's been a huge time saving time savings. Yes. Inventory tracking, keeping track of that. And as you sell it, it's like real time. The inventory goes away. So inventory tracking.
00:35:41
Speaker
was a huge, huge time saver. And also taking orders before Bondredore. I think we may have had a few things on our Squarespace store, but I mean, I would still get so many calls. How many wings come in a pack and how much does it weigh? And there was no variable weight with Squarespace. So that's what I love about Bondredore. You can do the deposit and then you can do the final charge based on the actual weight.
00:36:03
Speaker
of the product they receive. But I mean, I would probably would spend hours on the phone every week taking orders and explaining different cuts and how much comes in it. But with Barnadore, everything's right there. You can say how many come in the pack, what the size range is, what the price per pound is. And then Barnadore even gives you the estimated final cost. And then- So your customers get all the information.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yes. It's like a self-serve ordering. Yay. It was amazing. And y'all set up the whole thing for us. I just sent a spreadsheet of everything we had and the information and y'all set it all up with your stock photos and the photos that actually look beautiful because I think before I just had pictures of our frozen meat packages, which I mean, it's hard to make meat look pretty. It really is.
00:36:51
Speaker
It is. That's a thing. Just make sure you have good relationship with customers and they will buy your meat, even if it's ugly. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. That's great. No, it's good. I mean, there's just, I think any way that you can save time. It's interesting because you said you wrote a list of all the things that were stressful and then you slowly started to solve them. It's interesting because sometimes when I'm talking to farmers asking, Hey, what can we build for you next? Because to your point, we obviously help farmers with an online store, like you said, a website and a store.
00:37:21
Speaker
and the ability to use a POS in person, et cetera. But we're thinking about farmers the whole time. And so when I'm talking to farmers, I'm like, okay, where do you spend a lot of time? And I don't mean I'm harvesting or working soil or something. I actually mean on the business side, where are you spending not just so much time, but repeat time. And to your point, if you're having to explain for hours every week on the phone, the same cuts of meat or the same description to customers over and over again,
00:37:47
Speaker
That's a red flag for inefficiency. And so then we take that and we're like, okay, how can we make that? That's why there's all the descriptions and the estimated weights and everything else because we're like, okay, that's a way that we can save farmers time because farmers don't have extra time. And so then they can spend it on the things
00:38:04
Speaker
that are more important than repeating the things that you're like why do I keep saying this and now it's in my sleep and I'm dreaming this and yeah so anyway red flag if you're repeating the same thing over and over again that could be solved in a different way.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so interesting. Fabulous. Okay, let's talk about the future goals of your farm. Where are you headed? Yeah, so this year, we're planning to go back to one of our farmer's markets. And to be able to do that, well, I needed to hire help to help with our mobile farm sources. So we're working on that. So we have hired people to help us
00:38:40
Speaker
And when I say hire people, it's really just like friends that we either pay by meat or just do like an independent. Lovely. Never like, I've heard that that works well. It has worked well. I mean, it keeps it sticky. If like they don't do a good job and then you have to be like, you have to have that hard conversation with a friend. But for us, yeah, the two ladies that are going to take over the mobile farm store for me, we know them and have a good relationship with them. We have kind of.
00:39:07
Speaker
Trusted them to take that on so I can go back to the market because I knew I couldn't do all of it Yeah, so that's one thing
00:39:14
Speaker
And we're also going to be harvesting our first lamb this year and then the beef next year. And then another big thing, which I don't know, farm tours. So that we have loved doing just to offer that transparency because people are always like, well, how do you label your meat? And I'm like, well, we consider it pasture raised, but really we think the relationship with your farmer and actually setting foot on the farm goes above and beyond that. So we offer spring and fall farm tours just for our customers. It's very simple. They just walk the farm.
00:39:44
Speaker
and they can ask questions, we see the animals, and we're really trying to grow that this year.
00:39:50
Speaker
and also gear some more towards students. Cause we've had a lot of homeschool co-ops and stuff reach out to us wanting to bring their families out to the farm on a more educational level. So we're trying to look more into that and how we can just bring people out to the farm and educate and show them where their food comes from and hopefully gain some more customers as well through that just to getting people. I think I read a statistic that said like 2% of people actually attend farmer's markets arguably even less. So to your point, get the word out. Yes.
00:40:20
Speaker
If we can meet more people and get them on the farm and build that.
00:40:26
Speaker
have our farm trailer there that they can buy from at the end if they want to, be able to try and meet. You just need to keep inserting yourself in person and online. I think sometimes word of mouth in person is really important, especially if you're really intentional about it. Like you said, farm chores is brilliant or injecting yourself in different school events or different things like that. But you can insert yourself online too for word of mouth and thinking about both of those separately, whether it's social media or newsletters. Do you have any other advice for that?
00:40:56
Speaker
I would say I'm not the strongest on social media. I'm really good at stories. So I'll just take random videos throughout the day at the farm, do whatever, if I'm making food and share them stories. But as far as making posts and learning the algorithm and all that, I'm not great at that. Um, but you don't have spare time for that. Nope.
00:41:16
Speaker
So I would say, yeah, that's something I don't have down to a system. I just honestly do it when I think about it. And it's something that I can easily. Yeah. Fit into my day. I take the videos, the kids are in bed. I upload everything. It takes me five or 10 minutes. It creates conversations. People ask questions. They're like, Oh, that's so cute. And then they're like, Oh, my kids that age. And then like, Oh, actually I've been following your farm for three years. I still haven't tried your meat. This is where I live. So sometimes
Future Goals and Advice for New Farmers
00:41:40
Speaker
people.
00:41:40
Speaker
They'll follow you for years and they finally are ready to take the lead. A lot of our farmers do email and social media. Not all of them do social media as heavily, but they definitely do email heavily just in terms of making sure to maintain and be building that relationship. I don't know. Would you agree with that? 100%. Because whenever you post something on social media, only a very small percentage of your followers actually see it. But when you send an email, I think at this point our open rates like 50, 55%. That's miraculous.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, that many people are actually seeing it. Whether they read the whole email or not, at least they're seeing our farm name and they're being reminded, oh yeah, I need to place my order. Yeah, I think social media is a great echo to building the trust and the relationships, but the email is kind of cutting to the chase and obviously in person you can be gathering those emails too to keep building those relationships. It's really powerful. Hopefully you have an email sign up. And then also with social media, I try and every so often point people to the email list like, hey, this is what I shared, this is the recipe I shared.
00:42:39
Speaker
this in our weekly newsletter, like click here if you want to join the email list. That's a great idea. Use social media to point them back to the newsletter and the email list. Brilliant. I love the Mailchimp partnership with Barnadore, how I can see each email generates a certain amount of income. I can see that anytime someone places an order, they get asked if they want to join the email list. And I just love that partnership. It's made it really easy for us to grow our email list.
00:43:04
Speaker
that's awesome we love it when you're growing your email list well so do you right okay so now i have to recap because there were some really good points and i'm gonna miss basically somebody needs to listen to the whole podcast to get all the juicy ideas but i wrote down a couple of your zingers
00:43:19
Speaker
And then after I read them, I want you to think about if there's any last bits of advice for folks that are starting their firm, what advice you would give them and that we maybe didn't get a chance to discuss today. One of the ones was, I love this, you start learning to sell and market items even before it becomes your own enterprise. The way you did it with beef, you partnered with a farm, you figured out how to market it. And then you took on the enterprise and you already had that down, which was really powerful, I thought.
00:43:49
Speaker
And then I loved the adding enterprises slowly. You did that one kind of accidentally on purpose, which was poetic. You always take the things that come your way because you're always learning all the other things the hard way, right? But starting with chickens and then a couple years later adding in pork and then a couple years later adding in cows and just getting good at each one before moving on to the next. Brilliant.
00:44:10
Speaker
And then I loved the start marketing before you're selling. You were saying, Hey, I don't have anything to sell, but I can sure start talking about the chicks and I can start building relationships and just keeping people informed. Super powerful subscriptions. You said, I don't always do a recap, but you had so many good ones. I couldn't help it, Rachel. Subscriptions. You said that's your backbone. Like that's just recurring sales. You said about 30% guaranteed sales, which is just.
00:44:35
Speaker
Brilliant and miraculous, right? And you said do it as soon as you can. Just start right away. Yep. It doesn't have to be perfect. And I love that's another piece. Like it doesn't have to be perfect. You can adjust and your customers will be gracious with you, which is amazing. And that's the other one, which is build up your email list, be emailing your customers, build that trust, and they will follow you even as you adjust your business, which is so great.
00:44:59
Speaker
And then I also loved, I'm going to use this one by the way, make a list of the stressful things and then slowly tackle them one at a time. And it's just like you solve them in different ways. I think you said putting a time slot to organize your freezers. How brilliant is that?
00:45:14
Speaker
So all the good advice, all the good advice, and I'm sure you have so much more, but we have just a minute or two left. So what other bits of advice would you give before we put a pause on this podcast and we'll have to schedule another one. The thing that comes to mind is just, again, the grace. Give yourself lots of grace. Like you could have all the knowledge. You could read all the books.
00:45:34
Speaker
all the right people to learn from do all the right things and you still might not succeed in the way that you wanted to or the way you pictured it in your mind. But I think that's just part of the process. I was so hard on myself and my husband he deals with us too losing animals here and there like we can be so hard on ourselves. But I think we all do the best we can with what we're given and that's enough. You learn from those times and you try and do better the next time. We all have to do that. We could do all the right things and still
00:46:02
Speaker
mess up, but that's just part of the process. So I have real comfortable failing and failing and failing and then succeeding a little bit and then failing, failing, failing and then succeeding, you know, you just have to learn to adjust and try new things and get out of your comfort zone.
00:46:16
Speaker
If you want to really build something that is going to last for decades to come, which is what we're trying to do. We want our lifetime career and we would love our kids to take it every one day if they choose to do that. So we're trying to build something amazing and like that takes time and it takes hard work and you.
00:46:33
Speaker
got to push yourself and I don't like to do that. I like to be comfortable and I like only committing to things that I know I'm capable of, but you'll surprise yourself. Sometimes I've been forced into those situations and I really throw on accident because of just the circumstances. The farming is not cookie cutter. I think I was not confident and so I tried to do what I saw other farmers doing and it just never felt right or it never worked well. And so I just had to take little nuggets from everybody and figure out
00:47:01
Speaker
for us in our climate, in our farm, with our family, in our region. And that takes time again to just figure out what's going to serve your customer well.
00:47:12
Speaker
and then seasons change and you've got to change and you've got to be flexible. Yeah I appreciate that. Oh wow I'm gonna like go back and look at the script of everything you just said because it made me have like 20 more questions. Like in a good way. Taking advantage of opportunities. Obviously once you start building your farm and you get a few years down the road you're gonna have so many people asking things of you.
00:47:35
Speaker
And there's going to be things that you need to say no to, but I think really considering like I, we had so many people that reached out and were just like, Hey, so for instance, we had this lady that her husband was getting ready to deploy. They had just had their first child and she was away from teaching. And she's like, I have all the time in the world. I have a baby, so there's not much I can do, but if there is something I can do, can I just come volunteer my time and help you?
00:47:59
Speaker
I think initially I would be like, oh, like, I don't know. That's kind of weird. I don't know you. But I ended up saying yes. And like she has become the biggest blessing and one of my best friends. And she wow, equally and helps us. And she just takes some meat and eggs. And she's just happy to be a part of what we're doing. Like there's going to be Wow.
00:48:18
Speaker
that either want a homestead or maybe have their own farm one day or just want healthy food and they just want to be a part of what you're doing in a very small way and just give those people the opportunities maybe it's just packaging eggs for you maybe it's filling in for the farmer's market for you or maybe it's helping butcher chickens and just giving them an opportunity get to know them okay is this person not crazy okay cool then then you can get more opportunities
00:48:41
Speaker
We've said yes to some of those things that felt crazy at the time like I'm inviting the stranger into my home to help package eggs in my house, but they've ended up being big blessings because those believed in what we're doing, and they could never do what we're doing they were not in a position to do that and so just being a part of what we're doing.
00:48:58
Speaker
was a blessing for them. And it was a blessing for us. And yeah, it was weird and strange to do that, to say yes to random people. Yeah. But it, it ended up working out really well. And maybe one day we'll have a full-time employee that can do all the things. But right now it's a bunch of puzzle pieces that just kind of fit together and you have lots of hands. I love that. And you're just building community. Yeah. And to your point, people get to be part of something important. That feels good. Yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
That's amazing. Oh, well, thank you so much for all of the great advice in your time. So much more to talk about always, but thank you for the time you did give today before we tap you on the shoulder again. But it's great to learn from you and what you've done and what's worked and so many good ideas on scaling a business, growing a farm, being flexible, showing grace to yourself. I really love that one. That one we could talk about forever, I'm sure.
00:49:51
Speaker
but really appreciate your time today so much. I want to extend my thanks to Rachel for joining us on this week's podcast episode. You can check out more of Rachel and their farm on their Instagram handle. It's instagram.com backslash shink family farm, right? And that's S H E and K family farm. Just FYI at barn tour, we're humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more customers, increase sales and save time for their business.
00:50:21
Speaker
If you're an independent farmer who's just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at a while and want to simplify your business management, please visit barn to door.com backslash learn more. What's great. Cause there's connect sessions with great farmers like Rachel. And you can ask her a thousand more questions that are even more probably detailed and specific and that you can take away for your farm. Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the independent farmer podcast.
00:50:55
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn to Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country. For free farm resources or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barntodoor.com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.