Madison Avenue On the Farm

As I'm writing my Garlic Plan for the farm business course I'm taking through Everdale (Farmers Growing Farmers), there are two motivations. One is a concern about farm issues, including food security and the need to expand our production of locally produced food, to increase local food prices and, the need to increase peoples' awareness of the importance of locally produced food, one of which is locally grown garlic. My other motivation is concerned with the sales and marketing and distribution aspect of garlic. In this area I'm looking at garlic as a product, and what's the best way to develop this product. I'm using techniques that, I hope, are similar to what a marketing company does when they develop a product.

The difference for me is that I feel a greater level of satisfaction doing product development for my locally grown garlic than if it were say, a new design for a soup spoon. We don't need for people to buy another set of soup spoons, but we do need people to buy more local food, and for farmers to be paid a fair price for their hard work in producing that food.

I do find however, that I sometimes need to temper my position, as some people seem to feel that being a farmer and a business person do not belong together. I disagree. I think that a farm can be a platform to help educate people about local agriculture, and it can also be a well run business, marketing strategies and all. The more that farmers can borrow from the marketing methods of Madison Avenue the better off they'll be. There is a limit, however.

Perhaps a Few Guidlines are:
Farmers must recieve a fair price - this means that the farmer has to do a better job of recognizing his/her value. Only in this way will they do a better job of negotiating price.
Farmers must find more ways to sell directly to Consumers - Middlemen mean less profit and control for farmers. A problem is that there are not many direct sales options, aside from CSA (community supported agriculture), on-farm sales, and farmers' markets. There are however, more and more farm product distribution models emerging, such as 100 Mile Market, which gather and distribute farm products direct to consumers. Also, there are more companies which are creating added value products from local ingredients, such as Easy As Pie.

These companies remove the burden of conducting marketing and distribution from the farmer, but these new middle men are more philosophically aligned with farmers and, I assume more willing to negotiate a fair price. They are not the people and companies pushing cereal at the supermarket, where farmers receive a mere fraction of the profits. We need more of this new type of distribution model, since CSAs, farmers' markets and on-farm sales are limited in their reach.

(There are false farm friends emerging. These are corporate entities which purport to be supportive of farmers, and are not. As the demand for local produce grows it's not surprising to see corporate motivated companies pretending to be farm friendly. More on this later).

Farm Products Must be true to the cause - we can't get to the point where we're selling products just to increase the bottom line, without regard for other factors. For example, Greenhouse tomatoes grown in oil-fueled greenhouses may be stretching the limit. If the idea of organic and local farming is to lessen our dependence on petroleum-based fertilizer and oil-dependent global transportation, then raising oil-heated greenhouse tomatoes, although "local," would be a false solution, a mirage. Perhaps the solution is to sell tomatoe-based preserves in the winter - relish, tomatoe soup, etc. Or, we simply get used to the idea of not having tomatoes in the winter. And when summer comes, those lush heirloom tomatoes taste all the better.