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Balancing Retail & Wholesale Markets with Joe from Dirty Girl Produce
294 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're excited to host Joe Schirmer of Dirty Girl Produce again for a 1 year in review. Listen as Joe shares the changes and updates he's made to the business and how he's serving both wholesale and retail markets.
Show Notes:
https://www.dirtygirlproduce.com/
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the direct farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price, and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers save time and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
Meet Joe Shermer: A Farm Advisor's Journey
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast. I'm Rory, your host. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our farm advisors, Joe Shermer. Welcome, Joe. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Roy. It's great to have you back almost one year since you kind of first came on the podcast. Before we get too into things, for those who may not have listened to you the last time you were on the Direct Farm podcast, could you maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and some of your background and your farm?
00:00:57
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. My name's Joe Shermer. I live in Santa Cruz, California. I farm in Watsonville on four parcels. We have 42 acres. We grow anywhere from, I say 40 different things, but when you look on our barn door list, we have about 120 items.
00:01:14
Speaker
So it's different. And yeah, we have organic veggies. We've been doing it a long time since 96. And we just hustle at farmer's markets. We work retail here and there. We do wholesale here and there. We have a bunch of restaurant accounts and we just kind of link it together. And of course now we're doing local deliveries and pickup sites for farm boxes and different kind of generic stuff.
00:01:39
Speaker
Awesome. Well, your farm has maintained an organic certification for quite some time now. Could you maybe kind of talk about what that certification says about your products and also why that's a priority for you and
Organic Certification: Challenges and Benefits
00:01:51
Speaker
your farm? Yeah, I think that organic certification is really important because it's the only clear defined legal term in farming that we can really use, right? Even though there's a lot of people that are, say, further
00:02:07
Speaker
on the sound of organic that say, well, these standards aren't strong enough. But for me, it is aligned and we could fight over what gets allowed and what doesn't get allowed and what rules are used. So I've always been a big advocate of organic and certifying organic. It costs a little bit and it takes a lot of work to get it done.
00:02:26
Speaker
But it, you get a lot of it refunded anyway through the USDA. So there's really not too much to complain about when it comes to money. And unless you're a giant farm and you only get refunded $750, but I think it's 750, you get refunded and you've got to write a little booklet every year. You know, you gotta, you gotta do the paperwork. If you don't do the paperwork, you're not organic. And so I think a lot of people don't like that part of it, you know?
00:02:51
Speaker
But I'm really into it. I love being organic. CCOF started really writing the rules way back when in California a couple decades ago. And then that's really what's fed into the USDA national organic standards. So I like being a part of CCOF and being a part of the organic movement. You know, it's, it's something to talk about.
00:03:12
Speaker
And I have a lot of my neighbors here, farming neighbors that are organic. And so I can say, well, you know, all you gotta do is switch this out of your bone and do this. And it's a couple of change things. It's basically a purchase more than anything else. And then of course, doing the work of record keeping. I think the, the two things that you mentioned.
00:03:29
Speaker
both there is it's usually cost money and it's kind of time consuming to do. So it's definitely cool to hear your perspective on why that can be worth it. And maybe not as expensive as farmers
Community Engagement and Market Roles
00:03:38
Speaker
might think. You also in your local community, you mentioned kind of where you guys are farming in California, you were formally involved as the president of the board of directors for the Santa Cruz community farmers market, which I understand you're not doing anymore. But you're currently sit on the board of directors for the Center for urban education on sustainable agriculture.
00:03:55
Speaker
So could you maybe talk about how kind of being active in your community is a priority for you and how that's kind of helped shape Dirty Girl Produce and yourself as well?
00:04:04
Speaker
Sure. I think being on the political side of everything, if you can, sitting on boards, not just to get, you know, your opinion heard, but also to learn. I've learned so much. I'm on the board of the Santa Cruz farmer's markets right now. I'm not the president. I'm kind of sit back and it's a nice thing to have as you can call. That's one of the things I hope to be, but also on the board of Quesa, which is at the ferry building in San Francisco. I'm not on that board anymore, but I was for a while and you know, we hired an executive director.
00:04:34
Speaker
And then we started farmers markets in the city of San Francisco. I mean, it did some pretty big things, a lot of big fundraisers and a lot, for me, a lot of learning, you know, I really learned a lot about marketing and PR and working with professionals that are lawyers and architects and doctors and you know, think people that have gotten really successful in their fields. And of course all the farmers, you know, I mean, a great, great group of farmers that are hugely successful.
00:05:00
Speaker
And the kind of mentors to me were on that board. So it was, it was just really good for me to spend time and to be taken serious. And people say like, Oh, I think Joe should do that. I'm like, what really me? Wow. You know, so if anything, it felt flattering to, to, you know, someone to ask you to sit on a board like that. When I did sit on the board of Quays in San Francisco, I'd have to drive up there and now you don't have to drive up. You can do a zoom call. It's so funny. The difference just a few years has made.
00:05:23
Speaker
So I think it'd be much more approachable nowadays for people to sit on boards and you know, especially if you're rural and the board of directors of some farmers market organizations, I think are really important and easy. You know, if you can just zoom call in or even call in, you know, with the teleconference machine, which a lot of people have pretty easy to learn about business, learn about nonprofit and whatever. There's so many good nonprofits around farming that need the voices heard of people that are actually doing the work, you know.
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool to hear too, because I know sometimes, like you said, that can be a big time commitment, because that can be a big market opportunity too, just to kind of help get their name out
Adapting to Retail and Restaurant Market Changes
00:06:01
Speaker
there as well. So it's kind of been a little over a year, I think, since you were last on the direct farm podcast. How has the last year been for your farm? And what have been some maybe first, let's start with some of the challenges that you guys have kind of faced in the last year.
00:06:16
Speaker
You know, when retail and restaurants have dropped out, our wholesale has picked up and there's new, a lot of companies that do deliveries and there's a lot of different kind of businesses out there, caterers. And, and so we've just kind of, you know, run around and been adjusting. And of course, the last few months here.
00:06:35
Speaker
in the bay area, California, San Francisco bay area, the restaurants are coming back and they've been coming back in a big way. And it's been great because we've really adjusted our whole system for restaurants, putting orders in, you know, we started when we first moved over to barn the door.
00:06:51
Speaker
The big push was that, you know, all the restaurants closed or about to close and we wanted to do farm boxes. And so we're delivering and picking and that was just huge and busy. And so it's the same application that does that. There's just a different page for the restaurant wholesale. So it's been really good because it's given us time to work on our wholesale page.
00:07:10
Speaker
I can't wholesale restaurant because we try to get all the restaurants and all those businesses in on that and ordering online. And so as everybody's come back, it's been slow and steady and we've gotten to figure it out. And now that everybody kind of jumped in, it's really, you know, I'm just helping people get on and get logged in and figure out how we're doing things. I mean, we're changing. We used to have like a really.
00:07:32
Speaker
No rules, 30 day aging scenario. We just write a paper receipt and hope that their accountant gets it and sends a check in. I used to go in the fall when things would slow down and I'd have this big bundle of invoice receipts and I'd just start calling people.
00:07:48
Speaker
So, you know, I'm kind of done with that because we're really just having everybody pay for it when they place the order and then they have to place the order within a certain amount of time, 10 o'clock the day before. That way we know we have a heads up and it's just set in motion. It's going to save hours a week.
00:08:05
Speaker
I don't even know how many hours, text message, email, phone call, back and forth. You know, an order comes in to me in a text. I got to go to the field to make sure it's there. He's got to go check, and then he's got to tell me, and then I got to tell and confirm. And by that time, who knows what's happened. It's so much easy to get people, get a loading, place the order. It automatically goes to our pick and pack lists and it's sorted out and the addresses go into our routing software. It's just so much easier.
Growth in Wholesale and Farm Box Program
00:08:31
Speaker
So it's been really cool to watch everybody come back as a business owner doing this, you know, you have to do quite a bit of hand holding. If you've had existing customers that you've had different relationships with. So I've been really careful in navigating my tone and just kind of like trying to help people move along in, in doing this. And it's funny, I had someone on Saturday farmer's market cherry Plaza in San Francisco.
00:08:57
Speaker
Come up and said, yeah, okay. I finally did it. Cause I was helping him do this and do that and had to talk to accounting and finally accounting, give him a credit card. He made a purchase and then he made the second purchase. Then women did second purchase. Everything was already there. You just had an epiphany like, Oh my God, we're saving time on an hour end as well, which that's a lot of people don't get that because restaurants, they're all run differently.
00:09:20
Speaker
And, you know, some are really mom pocket operations where there's, you know, the, the chef is the owner and the buyer and everything, right? So they do everything or there's a partnership, some, so everybody's different and has a different way of doing stuff. So you got to kind of.
00:09:37
Speaker
get in there and navigate it and explain it. I've had to write out, you know, different emails that when people ask me, Hey, can you send me the email list of the price and say, Hey, this is going online. Now this is what we're doing. And now this kind of form letter that gives them a video shows them how to get on, how to sign up, how to place an order, what to expect.
00:09:58
Speaker
And so, you know, that you got to do that kind of stuff and it's all right. It's, it's okay. There's some people that are just tougher than others that just don't get it. Then you have to weigh how much you want them, you know, and, and, you know, we don't want to turn anybody away, especially because, you know, we're the ones that kind of changed the way we're doing things. Tricky thing is you email people, you can text them, even talking on the phone. If you talk to people in person, it's just so much different when you can really explain it.
00:10:25
Speaker
And it's just weird because some people just do it. They just, oh, online? Yeah. I mean, come on. We all buy things online anyway. We're already doing this. It's just some restaurants are not used to doing this, buying from farms. But when they do, you quickly realize that it's easier. And it's either I'm loaning you product slash money for 30 days, or your credit card is loaning you and just might as well use your credit card.
00:10:51
Speaker
because everything's tracked properly and we're not going to lose it. The other thing is really looking forward to not having a restaurant go bankrupt this year and owe me money that I never get because that happens every year. And that's just above it. People, you know, have problems. They talk to them and you work it out and it's fine. You know, they want to pay it and most of them want to pay it. Some people just like move out of town and
00:11:17
Speaker
And you're expected to go pick up restaurant equipment at their warehouse or something like that. Cause that's always stressful. Sometimes it's only like a few hundred dollars or sometimes a couple grand, but that'll offset any credit card fees right there. Yeah. Well, and that's good to hear that some of your customers are kind of realizing the convenience of.
00:11:36
Speaker
buying online. Like you said, they're most likely already buying tons of other things online. It's just a matter of them kind of adjusting to realizing that the restaurant can get their food.
From Education to Farming: Joe's Path
00:11:45
Speaker
It sounds like the wholesale side of the business has been a real area of growth for you and your farm over the past year. Has there been any other kind of areas of growth or success that you guys have experienced in the last year?
00:11:56
Speaker
Well, I'd really like our, what we call our foreign box program. We're not really calling it a CSA program at this point. We may transition to more of a traditional CSA model, but we just take advantage of the subscriptions that people want. But we also do single orders, single boxes.
00:12:13
Speaker
Farm box, salad box, and then when we have anything that's generic, like we have canned goods that are easy, you know, canned tomatoes, we have strawberry jam. So we, you know, we put those on the list and those are single. People can pick them up or get delivered in Santa Cruz. We're really hanging onto it and we really like it. It really serves us well because it allows us to put stuff in the box.
00:12:35
Speaker
that are things that we're longing, you know, like every week we have too much of something or we have too little of something to go on the list, you know? And so it's really been nice to be able to kind of ride that out and to, you know, well, we have a lot of cranberry beans this week, so everybody's getting cranberry beans. And I think it partners well with what we're doing.
00:12:58
Speaker
Awesome. And yeah, and kind of helps you manage your inventory a little bit better. Being able to throw in a little extra of something you might have there for customers is always, I think something they probably even appreciate getting some different kinds of varieties of things in their box. So you kind of started your farming education, I guess in college, correct?
00:13:16
Speaker
You know, I moved away. I grew up in Santa Cruz. I was a little surf rat, surf jock maybe. I moved to Southern California, San Diego State, business administration for a year, came back and then I went to UCSC and I created my own major in eco-psychology. So I was doing a lot of environmental studies, a lot of psychology, a lot of social psych. And so I did an internship at the homeless garden in Santa Cruz, which is a really neat program where it employs homeless people.
00:13:43
Speaker
They have a CSA and it's also a place people can just be, and they had served lunch and stuff. And so I went out there and I was just like, you know, I was thinking I wanted to see how horticulture helped different people. Like maybe it helps homeless people, maybe in prisons, maybe schoolyard, then you name it, right?
00:14:01
Speaker
And then I really just got hooked on the horticulture. I studied a lot of agriculture and I knew that it was important. If you look at our global problems in the world, agriculture always fits right in. Food is such a part of our everyday life that it's huge. So when I interacted at the homeless garden, I realized
00:14:21
Speaker
That's really what I wanted to do is I wanted
Advice for Aspiring Farmers
00:14:24
Speaker
to farm. So from there I interned on farms for the next few years. I interned slash work sometimes. You give you a little money, sometimes you wouldn't get any money or you work in the morning for free. You work in the afternoon, the market for some cash. You get food, you get tent space. That's all I needed when I was in my early twenties. That's all I wanted to do. One thing that's interesting at surfing, Jerry Lopez.
00:14:44
Speaker
famous Mr. Pipeline back in the day. He talked about people being in their first 20, which is 20 years. And I think it's a stay with farming. I think it's like the minimum of 20 years before you really start putting it together. I mean, the horticulture is fun.
00:14:59
Speaker
But it's really not until you go through drought cycles and you go through fires and you go through whatever terrible landlords and neighbors and, and people die paying, you know, all of the things that happened to you in life. And you experienced that as a farmer. I think that you really gain something that you can't just read in a book. And so I'm now my second 20.
00:15:23
Speaker
So that's pretty cool. What would your advice be for farmers that are kind of coming in without growing up on a family farm, for example, that are kind of coming in like you did looking to kind of start their own farm and get started as a farm business? Yeah. Well, I always give it kind of a gloomy prediction for people, you know, you just, one thing is if you farm long enough, you probably experience bankruptcy.
00:15:48
Speaker
Right. And eventually they'll quit farming. A lot of people that quit that like our middle income, they're like, get hooked on it. Like this is cool. I want to farm. They do it. They'll do it for a while. They'll quit their marriages. Marriages will split their girlfriends, boyfriends or partners. They'll split up. It's a lot of stress. It's really hard. So if you're going to do it long-term.
00:16:11
Speaker
Then what I think, I wish back in my twenties, I would have spent two more years and gotten, you know, an AA degree in accounting at the Breaux College, a community college. You know what I mean? Two years, that's nothing, right? Yeah. I mean, I could have, I could have done a lot of things like that, you know? So it's any, any time that you put in before you actually have the credit line in your name,
00:16:36
Speaker
Right? Before you have the least with your name, before you're the one that's fully liable and can't just walk away easily, put the time in, learn small business, learn accounting, learn the horticulture, which for most people is fun, but get to know other farmers, spend time on other people's farms.
00:16:54
Speaker
Because if they're a running business, there's something that they're doing that works. Once you start your own form, you're going to recreate the wheel over and over and over and over and over again. And it's terrible. And those are costly lessons every single time. You know, you can, if you have an endless trust fund and you don't have to worry about finances, then farming could be a lot of just the good stuff. You can equally pay people a living wage, which is a real challenge.
00:17:22
Speaker
And, you know, that's great, but most people don't have that. So, you know, especially young farmers, I always say, Hey, go have a career and farm in your forties, you know, get, get your, you know, 401k or your Roth IRA set up, get your savings plan, get, you know, figure it all out, get further along the line. Because if you want to do all that stuff.
00:17:45
Speaker
As a farmer, it's much harder because you just don't have as much wiggle room when it comes to finances. You know, the margins you're going to be making as a farmer are going to be very, very slim. So do everything you can before you get there. And then, you know, wouldn't it be nice to retire as a farmer? I know people that have done that, you know, they, they work their whole career. They retire. They buy a house. It's got acreage. They start growing things. They start selling at the farmer's market and it's a great lifestyle.
00:18:14
Speaker
You know, so there's a lot of different ways to do it. I really kind of ground it out, you know, my twenties thirties and forties. This is just what I've done. And I've had some moments of looking bankruptcy in the eye and come out the right side of it. You know, I've gotten knock on wood, very lucky, but I also have some huge mentors of their phone numbers in my cell phone that I call whenever I need to. And I don't know what I would do if I.
00:18:43
Speaker
didn't have the sobering voice of someone who has had more experience than me. Yeah. Well, so we just announced some of this, maybe some of this advice will be, will be similar or, but maybe if you could add a few things, but we just announced a partnership with FFA at our most recent direct conference. So for maybe students that are looking to get into farming at an early age, either straight out of college or while they're doing high school or college to kind of start
00:19:10
Speaker
their farm business. What would be some of your advice to them as they're just starting out? I think going to UC Davis, Cal Poly, that's around our area, the big ad schools. I think that's huge. You're going to learn so much there. If you know at an early age that you want to get into agriculture, I think it's huge. And of course there are so many different careers that you can make in ag. You don't have to be the one that's really hurting.
00:19:32
Speaker
out in the field and trying to, you know, make payroll and stuff like that. And you, there's a lot of businesses, there's a lot of nonprofits that need people that need a lot of skills. So I'd say, yeah, getting a good ag school is learning accounting. You know, if you learn accounting in ag, that's great. You can always transfer over to another business. Any job is going to be a business. So it's good to have that background and figure out, you know, how the, how the economy works, you know.
00:19:57
Speaker
So last time you were on the podcast, you had an interesting line. I thought you said the hardest thing for farmers is letting go of what's not working for you.
Embracing Change in Farming Practices
00:20:05
Speaker
And so I was wondering too, we've been talking about kind of a lot of the farmers just starting out, but for farmers that have been doing this for a while, what would be your advice to them? Yeah, I hear that. And I just hear myself. I was obviously talking to myself.
00:20:18
Speaker
You know, that's what I went through is like, especially when you have a business, when you either have a business for a while, or I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of what it's going to be like. Right. And once you get into it, you realize like, no, you're not going to grow this. You're not going to sell here and you need to change and it evolve and make sure everything's working out. And so I think a lot of times we get attached to certain things. Also the world changes. You know, everybody's going online. Everybody's paying with a watch.
00:20:48
Speaker
or a phone at the farmer's market. You know, not everybody obviously, but that is so normal that we have to make those changes and we have to constantly evolve. And so it becomes really hard for people, I think, to make change that when things aren't serving them, right? You're doing something that is just, you're spending too much money on, it's not efficient.
00:21:10
Speaker
And you look at, well, why are you doing it? You have an emotion. We have a psychological attachment. I just see that happen a lot with people in trying to shape what kind of farm they're going to grow. And then I see people make these amazing breakthroughs.
00:21:24
Speaker
when they really let us, hey, I should be growing flowers and selling here only. Because that's what's making me money and that's what's paying, paying the bills, you know, and then you make a shift, you make a radical shift and things become easier, not easier, but you know, less hard. Your farm, like you mentioned earlier, you guys have always done a pretty good portion of wholesale to retail. Could you maybe talk about how barn to door kind of makes that more manageable?
Efficiency with Barn to Door
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah. You know, we really have essentially like a farmer's market customer, a retail customer, and we have a restaurant or a full sale customer. So it just really, we still do farmer's market and those don't go into Barnador at all. That's still, you know, a separate entity. Although we do have pickups through Barnador at all of our farmer's markets. So.
00:22:13
Speaker
You know, we've just navigated and used the framework that Barnadore uses to work specifically to our needs. We've been able to get, you know, our, our farmbox program on the retail page. And then we have a newsletter for retail customers. And then we have a separate page and newsletter for our wholesale slash restaurant customers. We sell a lot to a local.
00:22:39
Speaker
delivery service, good eggs here in the Bay area. They've been huge and they're, they're supporting a lot of small farms. So they're huge. And a lot of times people will say, whoa, you know, we tried to deliver as well in the San Francisco Bay area, East Bay and all that, but it's just too much for us. It's really not what we do. So we're inefficient. So now we partner with them and there's a couple other businesses that deliver our stuff.
00:23:01
Speaker
So it's kind of easier for us to just, they go through on the door, buy stuff, it goes there and they, they deliver versus people go, Hey, can you deliver my, my address? And we just write them back to, Hey, here's a link to the store, to the item in the store, good egg for star or whatever. And so, you know, we're just been navigating what we can do and what we can't do. Sometimes it's better for someone else to do that delivery park, but we have locked into our local delivery here in Santa Cruz County, which we never had before. So that's great because we're really selling a lot more locally.
00:23:31
Speaker
I just want to increase that, you know, as much as I can selling local. So that's been really cool. Yeah. I think last time you talked about when you first started offering that local delivery that you thought it would be mostly just your farmer's market customers that wanted the delivery.
Online Sales and Local Delivery Expansion
00:23:45
Speaker
Could you maybe talk about new ways in the last year that you guys have been trying to make it convenient for customers to get your produce?
00:23:51
Speaker
I think it's been really eye-opening too, because I opened it up and I started, you know, seeing the names and getting the emails and stuff. But a lot of new customers came up that had always heard of us and always wanted to get our stuff or maybe did once, but couldn't make it all the time. And so we've found that we have a huge fan base locally of people that weren't able to buy our stuff. So now they're able to do it. You know, I'm just like, God, why didn't I do this before? You know, I hadn't really thought of it. And so.
00:24:19
Speaker
No, it's a whole different level since people can buy online any kind of social media posts or any kind of article in the local paper or, you know, there's national papers, any kind of hit that has a link people go to and they can go to and they can order something. It's a totally different.
00:24:36
Speaker
way of promoting, you know, I mean, while we used to do it, we just pretty much did no promoting, no promotion, zero. You know, we go to the farmer's market, that's where people are going to be. If we're going to promote, we're going to try and get the market organization to get the farmer's market to be more attractive, some people come and then there's my customers, right? So that's always how I approached it. But now,
00:24:59
Speaker
We find people online and of course with shipping, you know, we can, we have shippable items that we can ship too. So we can send things all over the country right now. We're not doing fresh veg right now, but all canned goods and hats and merch and all this kind of stuff, you know, we can do that. And people are out there that hear and follow us on Instagram that don't live.
00:25:18
Speaker
within our area or don't have, you know, these two days a week that we would have farmers market. So it's just, it's really opened it up and it's still, you know, we're still evolving. I don't know where we're going to be in two years from now because I'm sure there'll be something new that we're doing that, you know, will improve the way we're doing it and improve our reach and our ability to sell more to people that are local.
00:25:43
Speaker
So as a customer and a farm advisor to Barn to Door, could you maybe share a little bit about what your experience in that role has been so far and maybe also how Barn to Door has evolved in terms of product innovation and services and support for farmers, especially in the last year or since you first kind of came on with us?
00:26:01
Speaker
It's been cool because, you know, like I said, even being on a board, it's kind of flattering to say, Hey, do you want to be on our advisory committee? Wow. Me? Thank you. It's been cool because bar where, I mean, look, the e-commerce is all new. There's no e-commerce that's like generations old. It's all new.
00:26:18
Speaker
And just since I've been on, it's been good to get on there and say, Hey, this is the way that we want to use on the door. And this is what our customers are saying. And then the feedback is like, there's, it's instantly in and there's always updates coming out and there's new apps that are linking, whether it be route to pick and a quick books, they started linking with QuickBooks, which is good. Cause it's, it's a little part of QuickBooks.
00:26:45
Speaker
But it's a beginning figuring all that stuff out how to do that. I mean, I just can't even imagine, you know, it all seems like it, you know, it takes a lot of time, but it's really evolving so quickly. It's a constantly evolving platform. And I just think that that's part of the bar in the door is that they're
Joe's Role with Barn to Door and Future Goals
00:27:03
Speaker
evolving. You're not like, no, this is how we do it. We're not changing. You know, it seems like a very contrary.
00:27:08
Speaker
to that. It's very like, let's ride this out and evolve as we go and support as many farms as we can. Because, you know, like I said before, one of the big things about this is restaurants aren't used to buying from small farms electronically or online. And it's because of Born to Door that we're able to, you know, I'm not going to be able to write software to do this or, you know, I mean, can you imagine like,
00:27:34
Speaker
I mean, no way, you just can't, I feel like the Barnador is really forward thinking and evolving and really it's kind of supportive. There's so much tech support for me. When I, I did a roadblock, I can't figure something out and I just go, you know, support and the right there, you know, I still get a weekly meeting.
00:27:54
Speaker
Which is so great. So maybe just as a final question, looking ahead to the next year, what are some of your goals? That's a really good question. I mean, my first goal as a small farm is survival. For small farms, I think it's so hard to compete against big farms, against wholesale. It's a race to the bottom. And when the price bottoms out and you're stuck with the field full of produce, then you barely get paid to pick it. It can be tragic. So we're really like right on that edge with the margins. And I really.
00:28:23
Speaker
I'm trying to tweak the knobs and push as much over into retail. There's a potential to do that with online retail sales. I see it and I'm feeling it. And I just wanted to figure out how to do more.
00:28:39
Speaker
That's great to hear. Just kind of keep trying in every way that you can just to be top of mind with the customers and get them to direct them to your store so they can hopefully make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter or something like that. That's great. I want to extend my thanks to Joe for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn to Door, we are humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farmers like Joe who implement sustainable agriculture practices and support their local community.
00:29:06
Speaker
For more information on Dirty Girl Produce, visit dirtygirlproduce.com or to learn more about Barn to Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm, go to barn to door.com slash resources. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.