Ready Farmer One: The Farmer's Guide to Selling and Marketing

By Diego Footer, Nina Galle and Jean-Martin Fortier

What if you could increase your farm sales, reach new customers, streamline your sales process, and get back all the time you spend at the farmers' market?

What if this is all possible from your home office?

An online farm store makes all of this possible, and Ready Farmer One is the blueprint

• Language: English
• Publisher: West Coast Permaculture LLC
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781087962733

Book preview

READY

FARMER

ONE

The Farmer's Guide

to Selling and Marketing

Diego Footer

Nina Galle

Foreword by Jean-Martin Fortier

Introduction by Dan Brisebois

Copyright © 2022 by

Diego Footer and Nina Galle

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any matter without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Edited by Paul Meyer

Illustrations by Arielle Roxas

Layout by Ana Secivanovic

Ebook design by Marcelo Cimadamore

First Printing: May 2022.

www.readyfarmerone.com

Praise for Ready Farmer One

I haven’t been this excited about a book for a long time. Most of us farmers aren’t savvy about electronic marketing and social media, but Diego and Nina answer every question like a recipe book—you can do this.

–Joel Salatin, livestock grazing

pioneer and author of You Can Farm

Ready Farmer One is the most important new farming book of the next decade. I’ve learned a lot, and you will too.

–Jean-Martin Fortier, best-selling

author of The Market Gardener

You’re lucky because it’s never been easier to start an online store, and Diego and Nina would love to walk you through all the things you need to create a great one!

—Dan Brisebois, farmer at Tourne-Sol Farm and

teacher at The Farmer Spreadsheet Academy

The value of the knowledge shared in this book is priceless. If you're planning to launch your business online, Ready Farmer One is a MUST read.

—Nicole Pitt, farmer at Flower Hill Farm

Marketing and sales management have always been critical to farm success. We can seed, weed and harvest as much as we like, but without the proper marketplace, there is no profit. This book provides a logical pathway to get farm sales online where distribution waste is lower, profit is great, and the farmer gets to sleep in for once!

—Zach Loeks, founder of The Ecosystem Solution Institute and

author of The Two-wheel Tractor Handbook

FREE BONUS MATERIAL

Thank you for reading Ready Farmer One.

We want you to be as successful as possible, so we put together several additional free resources, including:

A saveable, printable Instagram tip sheet to help you get more followers and create better posts.

Three Farm Marketing Secrets - fail to do these, you will have a hard time selling products.

Beginners Guide to Taking Amazing Product Pics - no fancy camera needed.

To get instant access to all of those free bonuses (plus a few additional surprise gifts), go here now:

www.readyfarmerone.com/bonuses

Acknowledgments

Nina Galle

I’d like to thank the team at Local Line. You were always there to provide much-needed insight, connect me with the right people, and are the reason we can help farmers every single day. I hope you’re as proud of yourselves as I am of you. To our founder and CEO, Cole, thank you for your relentless support and non-stop belief we could make this happen.

To my parents, Willem and Jolanda, and sister, Nadina, thank you for your constructive feedback, the countless discussions, and unwavering support. Jason, thank you for all the chapters you read, re-read, and read again.

Diego Footer

An immense amount of gratitude to my wife Kim. Without you doing the hard work, none of the easy work I do would be possible.

Alone we can do so little; together, we can do so much.

When we started to write this book last year, we never could’ve imagined the journey it would take us on. What began as a mission to write the farming book we knew was missing turned into dozens of interviews, transcripts, and discussions to understand what farmers needed to sell online. The result is Ready Farmer One — and we could not be more proud.

We could not have done this alone. Over 50 farmers and entrepreneurs contributed to this book. Thank you to everyone for sharing your stories and giving your feedback. Without you, this book would not have been possible.

Featured Farmers and Experts:

Josh Shelburne

Robert Arnold

Jesse Way & Meghan Brandenburg

Vannah Roddy

Bill Brinkerhoff

Chris Thoreau

Carrie & Joe Chlebanowski

Darby Simpson

John Spaulding

Max Becher

Trey Johnson

Sam Bellavance

Luke Groce

Corinna Bench

Melissa Ballard

Jeremy Tolley

Kevin Espiritu

John Reinwald

Stephanie Haynes

Laura Vree

Charles Mayfield

Dan & Hilary Papuchis

Erich Schultz

Hermann Bruns

Ilana Richards

Joel Salatin

Justin Gay

Paul Greive

Quinn Richards

Susan Greutman

Contents

Chapter 1 | Get Started with Online Sales

Chapter 2 | Choose an Online Sales Platform

Chapter 3 | Identify a Farm Sales Model

Chapter 4 | Design a Customer Friendly Online Store

Chapter 4.5 | How to Set Up Your Local Line Store—A Step-by-Step Guide

Chapter 5 | Run an Efficient Online Store

Chapter 6 | Build a Successful Farm Website

Chapter 7 | Fulfill Orders Successfully

Chapter 8 | Create a Memorable Farm Brand

Chapter 9 | Story Marketing: Tell Your Farm’s Story

Chapter 10 | Three Keys to Successful Marketing

Chapter 11 | Farm Marketing Strategies

Chapter 12 | Build Long-Term Customer Relationships

Chapter 13 | Take Instagram to the Next Level

Chapter 14 | Bringing Your Farmers Market Online (and How to Manage It)

Chapter 15 | Lessons Learned from 10,000 Farmers Selling Online

Small-Scale Farming Revolution:

Farming for the Long Haul

By Jean-Martin Fortier, organic grower and teacher of the Market Gardener’s Masterclass

Everyone that knows anything about small-scale organic vegetable farming will tell you that it’s tough . . . very tough.

When city people hear this, they immediately assume that the physical work involved in working the land and the long, long harvest hours spent bending over is what is implied here. But they’re wrong—the physical aspect of farming and the long hours spent outside are actually what growers LIKE about their job.

The reason small-scale farming is so hard, and why so many who dream of owning and running a small farm have not succeeded or quit after a few years of disappointment, is that the profit margins and the return on goods produced are very small.

In other words, you need to work a lot to make not very much.

This being said, small-scale farming does create value—and tons of it.

People in cities across North America genuinely appreciate the essence of buying fresh produce directly from the people who grow it. The hype and excitement about farmers markets isn’t going away, as more and more people feel the need to connect with those that feed them. As prices for commodities that need to be shipped from far away keep on rising, the demand for local produce has exploded, and this trend is not abating.

As a farmer, you can change the food system. You are a major actor in a substantial shift toward a new way of buying and eating food. Not only from changing how we grow and produce food, or pushing consumers to rethink how they eat—but you are at the forefront of making local food more accessible.

For new organic growers, success comes with mastering the art of growing vegetables efficiently and economically. My line of work has been to share and show how to do so on small parcels of densely cultivated crops. Mastering the art of growing is what our craft is all about.

But that success in small-scale farming isn’t just about growing; it’s just as much about selling. This part of our job can never be neglected, and learning best practices about selling your produce is just as important as growing it.

In most businesses today, profit comes from small margins made on large sales volumes. That’s how big farms make money selling to distributors and large grocery store chains that are more or less completely integrated. Winning at that game means only one thing: get big or get out.

Small-scale farming doesn’t work this way, and it shouldn’t. The competitive advantage of small farmers is we can sell smaller volumes at better margins. We do this by selling our products ourselves—directly to consumers with whom we connect personally.

Cutting out the middleman and selling products directly to consumers is the main reason behind the resurgence of small-scale farming in the past thirty years. It started with CSAs and farmers markets and evolved in many different ways.

Today, the future of local food is online.

Online sales have the potential to break the barriers of current sales channels, allowing growers to take control.

Take Hilary Papuchis from Hildan Produce. When starting their microgreens business, Hilary knew she wanted to target chefs in her community. Through her online presence—on social media and their online store—she quickly saw consumers show interest in their products. Their customer base doubled. Online sales allowed her to service wholesale and direct to customers through one avenue.

E-commerce for a small farm also saves time otherwise spent on administration, standing at the market, and organizing invoices and orders (often poorly!).

Take Hermann Bruns from Wild Flight Farm. Moving away from their CSA model to diversify their sales presented challenges. How much time would be spent standing at the market, taking orders, organizing everything? Now operating predominantly online, his time spent on recordkeeping has been drastically reduced.

By making profitability, convenience, and accessibility the forefront of how you operate, all the other benefits of small-scale farming can thrive. Improving community health by minimizing exposure to pesticides, providing habitat for surrounding ecosystems, and reducing distances that food needs to travel—all are the result of a successful local food system.

Throughout this book, you will learn how to utilize the technological tools that are now paving the way for successfully conducting a small-scale farming business.

Ready Farmer One is the most important new farming book of the next decade. I’ve learned a lot, and you will too.

Ready Farmer One: The Farmer's Guide to Selling and Marketing

As if drought, cucumber beetles, and broken farm implements weren’t enough for farmers to worry about.

Along comes March 2020 and a worldwide pandemic.

Overnight, farmers markets and restaurants shut down, unsure when they would open again. All the places that you relied on to sell your crops might not be able to help you out this growing season, you thought.

And yet, all those eaters who used to shop at farmers markets and eat at restaurants—they still needed to eat, and they wanted to eat your fresh, local, delicious, ecologically grown vegetables.

How were you going to get your vegetables, flowers, jams, meat, and grains into these eaters’ hands?

Well, there was one group of farmers who weren’t worried about these same things. Like anyone, they had the COVID pandemic on their mind, but farmers who had an online store and an email list knew how they were going to sell that summer’s crop.

At Tourne-Sol co-operative farm, we’d been running our seed company through an online store since 2010. And we had been taking some surplus vegetable orders through the store too. When COVID came, we quickly pivoted everything online, including our plant sale. Over a weekend, most of the plants sold out.

Our clients still wanted a way to get seeds, plants, and food.

But I knew that you didn’t have to have ten years selling online to be able to do this. There are more tools than ever to be able to get online quickly.

In addition to being a farmer, I also run the Farmer Spreadsheet Academy. I predominantly focus on helping farmers with their crop planning and harvest management. I do this through simple spreadsheet-based systems that ensure their farm is going the direction they want it to.

With this rapid transition to online, I needed to make sure I could help farmers get online. I put together a Facebook group called Move Your Farm Store Online and invited my friend Jonathan Bruderlein from Ottawa Farm Fresh to help me run a series of interviews and discussions to cover all the basics.

Before we knew it, we had a bunch of farmers join us, and they had a bunch of questions.

And we were able to answer a lot of questions.

But you know what I really wished for?

I wanted a book that I could recommend to all these farmers, and tell them to read this section and this section and come back next week for us to talk about.

And I think Diego Footer and Nina Galle might have been thinking just the same thing.

Diego hosts the Farm Small Farm Smart podcast, and just about that time he decided to feature an Online Sales series. Every week Diego spoke to farmers who’d been selling online for a while or who recently made the jump. He talked to folks using Facebook Reko rings and folks using e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Local Line. He spoke about the logistics of setting up your store and managing inventory and orders every week.

Every week I excitedly listened to the episode and quickly shared it with the Move Your Farm Store Online group. (I even got to be a guest one week!)

This series was a great resource to give farmers an overview of what was possible and how easy it could be.

And now, along with Nina Galle, Diego has taken the next step and put together this book: a thorough exploration of everything you need to know to get your farm store online quickly and easily.

Ready Farmer One is the book I wish farmers had in March 2020. And I’m really excited that we finally have it.

If you don’t have an online store yet, this book is your excuse to Move Your Farm Store Online!

Even though farmers markets and restaurants are mostly up and running again, and you’re able to deal directly with clients once more, all your eaters have now had a taste of what it’s like to shop for local food online. And though they missed the human connection during that time, they loved the convenience and will likely keep ordering some of what they eat online.

And you want to be one of the farmers that these eaters are ordering from!

You’re lucky, because it’s never been easier to start an online store, and Diego and Nina would love to walk you through all the things you need to create a great one!

And so get ready farmers—it’s go-time.

Dan Brisebois

The Farmer Spreadsheet Academy (spreadsheet.farm)

Farmer at Tourne-Sol co-operative farm

Say Goodbye to the Market Day

Saturday morning, 3:30 a.m. The alarm was going off.

Not many people enjoy getting up at this hour, but it’s a necessity for some.

Today was market day.

Like many farmers, Jesse Way from Milky Way Farm dreaded market day. The day was incredibly long—waking up at 3:30 a.m. to pack the truck, and coming home and crashing at 8:00 p.m.

It wasn’t fun, but it was what he had to do as a farmer.

Each Saturday began the same way: loading the truck and driving to the local farmers market. Once there, the setup began.

Running their market-style CSA, Jesse would have to lay out all the vegetables that week and wait until CSA members would come to pick up their shares. Each CSA member was able to choose what they wanted based on the availability for the week. It all took so much time between waiting, packing, and administration.

Throughout the day, retail customers would come through the market to browse his booth. Some would end up buying their whole grocery list; others would chat him up only to leave empty-handed, going on to the next booth. Days were long and exhausting.

After a long day, Jesse would pack up, drive home, and crash. Sunday was his only day off…but what could he do with it? He was exhausted.

Long Saturdays are the reality for many farmers selling at farmers markets. The days are long, and the sales are unpredictable.

For many new or part-time farmers, spending an entire day at the market makes life hard. There are so many other things to do: fieldwork, office work, or having more than one day off a week. If you have a family, this lack of free time makes things even harder to endure.

But, when Jesse and his partner, Meghan, moved their farm sales online, everything changed.

They said goodbye to market days.

Their online store allowed them to control their hours. They worked to transition their CSA customers to their online platform, and the farmers market was no longer needed for sales or as a pickup location.

CSA members could order whatever they wanted that week through the online store and pick it up on Saturday. Their online store and the local pickup gave them back most of their Saturday.

As a dad, it changed Jesse’s life. Quality of life has improved, he says. Now I just wake up at a normal time and get to spend time with our son before I go. When I get back, I’m not exhausted. When I used to go to the market all day on Saturday, Sunday would be a write-off. I would be so tired and unable to do anything. Now, I get to hang out with my family and still have the energy to do so.

What would you do with an extra day off a week?

How different would your life look if you didn’t have to go to a farmers market every weekend?

How would your family feel about that?

What could online sales do for not only your business but for you?

Chapter 1

Get Started with Online Sales

The small-farm space will look dramatically different in ten years.

Do you want to participate in the change, or be a casualty of it?

If you don’t establish space for your farm online, another farm will gladly take it.

The future of direct-to-consumer farm sales is online.

We do everything on our phones now—from ordering home goods to dating to buying cars. Yet ironically, one space that has lagged behind is the small-farm space—specifically direct-to-consumer food sales. Selling vegetables, meat, and other farm products online is still relatively new compared to other sectors.

The good news?

If you get in now, you are getting in early.

COVID-19 fundamentally changed the way we do everything. Curbside pickup is now the norm. Restaurants that never would have offered take-out all do now. Heck, you can even get drinks at bars to go. People are conditioned to go online to purchase everything.

It’s simply easier. You can do it at home at any hour of the day.

Gone are the days of having to drive down to the store to get something and hoping they had it in stock. Now you can order online, pull up, hit a button on your phone, and someone brings your product to you. Buying has never been easier.

Unless you are talking about buying hyper-local food.

Currently, the easiest way to support local farmers and purchase hyper-local food is at the farmers’ market. It is a great option for farmers and some of the public. Some is the important word here because only 12 percent of adults buy groceries at the farmers’ market.

Why?

Because it isn’t easy.

Kids, busy schedules, weather, parking, and yet another thing to do all make shopping at the farmers’ market a pain in the neck for most. As a farmer you might not like that, but it’s the reality. If you only sell your products at farmers’ markets, you only sell to 12 percent of the adult population. You are missing out on 88 percent of the buying public.

How do you start to reach the other 88 percent?

By selling online.

76% of adults shop online, with over 50% purchasing something once a month.

(source: cloudwards.net).

You remove all of the friction people have to buy local food by selling online.

That doesn’t mean they will buy from you, but it does make it a lot easier.

Is your farm taking advantage of that?

Selling online allows you to reach your customers directly through a channel that you completely own. It’s a model you are completely in charge of. You’re in charge of marketing, sales hours, products sold, and customer service. You don’t have to rely on anyone else to do that work for you, nor do you have to rely on the weather to work with you.

Having an online store is so much more than just another sales channel. It is a way to organize your sales. It makes selling easier, so you don’t have to abandon the farmers’ market. Instead, you can get the best of both worlds—selling to the farmers market crowd and the non-farmers market crowd more efficiently.

Many of the farmers we’ve talked to sell wholesale, at the farmers market, to retailers, farm-to-table programs, and at the farmstand. Instead of just thinking about an online store as another market stream, think of it as a way to organize all of those sales models into one platform.

Orders, payments, customer information, and more are in one place.

After working with over 10,000 farmers, having candid conversations with food hub operators, market managers, and growers, and learning how this online culture has changed the way people shop, we know this will be a gamechanger for small farms.

Will your farm be one of them?

How to Use this Book

We wanted to create the go-to book for creating, designing, and marketing your farm’s online store. Each chapter will cover a different skill set required to sell online successfully. From order fulfillment to setting up a website to marketing, you should be prepared to launch in no time.

The table of contents will be your best friend. We’ve divided this book into three main sections: create, design, and market. Already have one topic covered and only interested in the other? No worries! This book was designed to read in the way which best suits you.

You will also find many checklists, pro tips, and farmer insights throughout the chapters. We hope this helps you pull out the most relevant information and apply it to your business.

Finally, this book is all about peer-to-peer learning. Who’s better to help farmers sell online than those who have done it before? We’ve included over twenty interviews from other farmers just like you between the chapters!

Stuck or need some inspiration? Use the farmer interviews to seed new ideas. Each farmer shares their methods, best practices, and stories on how they became successful digital farmers.

Our Rules for Success

There’s a lot in this book. Don’t try to take it all on at once. Master one thing before taking on the next.

Do something. Find the subject or method you are most excited about and start there.

Create a plan for success by following James Cleer’s two-minute rule. Do something two minutes every day to start forming a new habit. Writing, posting to social media, responding to emails, etc. Overcome instant-overwhelm by starting with just two minutes a day.

This book isn’t a recipe book for success. It’s a compilation of ideas, best practices, and base principles. Use them to get started and adapt to your context.

Who cares what others say—if it works, it works.

Don’t blindly copy what another farm does and expect it to work. Think about why it might work for them and how it could work for you.

Be you! Don’t judge your success against other farms. Everyone is at different stages.

Try stuff! The world hasn’t figured everything out.

Keep the dialogue going. This book is all about peer-to-peer learning. Find something that works really well for you? Share it with others!

Want to Learn More?

We realize there’s much more to learn beyond the book’s scope, so we have created a Ready Farmer One resource hub. This hub includes interviews, worksheets, videos, guidebooks, links, and more to connect you with farmers, experts, and entrepreneurs who have been there and done it.

Visit the resources page readyfarmerone.com/resources or scan the QR code below.

Guides:

Throughout the book, we’ve integrated guidebooks, worksheets, videos, and tools for you to master your online skillset. These extras will be noted in the chapters and can be accessed using QR codes or at readyfarmerone.com/resources.

Interviews:

All of the full-length interviews with the farmers featured throughout the book can be found at readyfarmerone.com/resources and using QR codes in the book.

Podcast:

Diego launched the business podcast Carrot Cashflow along with the book. Through these episodes, Diego sits down with farmers and experts in the industry to focus on the business side of growing food. Hear some of the great farmers we interviewed for this book at

paperpot.co/carrotcashflow.

You can also watch interviews and clips on Diego’s YouTube channel youtube.com/diegofooter or by searching for Diego Footer.

Learn more about the authors:

As we take you along this journey, we thought it would only be appropriate to introduce ourselves.

Josh Shelburne

Whole Heart Farm—wholeheart.farm

Josh Shelburne is the owner of Whole Heart Farm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He’s been farming his one-third-acre market garden farm for four years. Previously he also owned and operated a farmers market. Prior to early 2020, the majority of his farm’s income came from farmers markets; now it comes from online sales.

SELLING AT A FARMERS MARKET VERSUS SELLING ONLINE

Diego Footer: What are your thoughts on selling online versus having to go to the farmers market, from a lifestyle standpoint?

Josh Shelburne: Although I will always appreciate the farmers market for what it gave us in our business, and the friends that came from the experience, I never loved going to the farmers market. I helped out at the farmers market before I started attending under my farm name. I had six years of it, roughly, before 2020. It was around then that I started seeing the value of direct-farm sales, and that got me thinking about how to get out of our farmers market—even though we would show up and we would sell out pretty much every weekend, and the money was good.

But, hands down, I would rather stay at the farm, make similar or even slightly less money week to week, and not have to go to a farmers market. Energetically and lifestyle-wise it was draining to go to the market. You are on your feet the whole time, shuffling vegetables around the table. You’re talking to hundreds of people, and you’re trying to make eye contact with a thousand people. It wears you out.

I’m not opposed to ever going back to a farmers market if it made sense. But right now, presales to an email list through an online store, followed by a farm pickup, is a better option for us than the farmers market.

But if you’re brand new, the farmers market is a great place to find your customers. We would never have the email list that helped us survive and thrive last year if we hadn’t attended and put in the work at a farmers market. People saw us there every week, and that built up enough trust where it wasn’t a question that they would follow us to farm pickups when we did leave the market.

BUILDING A CUSTOMER BASE

DF: You gained a lot of customers organically in the beginning, and you’ve added a lot through word of mouth. Are you doing anything to incentivize your current customer base to bring in other customers, or is this just something that has been natural in the course of you running your business?

JS: The latter, honestly and truly. And you could say that’s a little bit of luck. You could go back to the quality thing. You could go back to customer service. People like us, and it really has grown organically since we started the online store.

LOCATION MATTERS

JS: One unfair advantage our farm has is that we are centrally located in town. We’re right next to a fairly busy road, and we are on the corner lot. When you pull off of that road, you immediately see the farm, and you can pull over and pick up vegetables at our farm gate almost immediately after turning. It’s very convenient to pull up and turn around and get out of there.

Robert Arnold

@pvfproduce, pvfproduce.com

For over 30 years, Pleasant Valley Farm has provided customers with high-quality vegetables. Until COVID, the farm sold 90 percent of its products directly to consumers at local farmers markets.

This is Robert’s story about Pleasant Valley’s transition to online sales.

I grew up in Argyle, New York, which is about 30 minutes from the Vermont border, in Washington County. From about 2006 on we did three markets a week. One was on a Wednesday afternoon and two were on a Saturday.

I would say, from my perspective, that Saturday was necessary. It was the culmination of the week’s work. You had to go to market, because otherwise the week’s work meant nothing.

I personally don’t mind working markets and selling things, but it most certainly is exhausting—especially to someone who doesn’t gain energy from being with people. On Saturdays you get home from market and you’re done.

I could always see that with my parents. They were exhausted by the time Friday came, and then my dad had to get up at 3:30 in the morning on Saturdays to load trucks for market. This is after working all week, mostly long hours, especially in the summer; he’d be working till nine o’clock at night usually, depending on how many people we had helping.

It was the thing that just had to be done. There was no other good option. There weren’t as strong markets any other day of the week. Of course, later on, the local area started having Sunday markets, but that just somehow seemed worse.

There are some farms in our area that go to New York City on Saturdays. They leave at two or three in the morning and drive to New York City, and those are all-day markets, so they don’t get done until the evening. Then they have to drive home, or they get a hotel and stay overnight. As farmers got older, they started going the hotel route, but the younger ones drive back. And that’s a day.

For years, the farmers market model worked great. Then things started to change. Fewer and fewer people were coming to market each week.

We always asked ourselves how we could get customers to be more consistent. They want to be there, but their lives just get in the way because the market’s scheduled for these four hours, and there’s no way to change that effectively.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened and Pleasant Valley Farm was forced to move online.

That was a forced move. I think it would have been a slower adoption. I think it would have taken more effort, marketing, talking to customers, walking them through, getting on the system to think about doing it.