Weekend recipe for your farm newsletter. More recipes and stories at: http://expatriateskitchen.blogspot.com/

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Apple-sage Roasted Chickenzilla
1 large pastured chicken
1 apple cut in half
1 rosemary sprig
3 thyme sprigs
1 handful of fresh sage
olive oil
coarse sea salt
balsamic vinegar
pepper
rubbed dry sage
dried rosemary

Preheat oven to 350 degree convection roast if you have a convection oven.

Stuff chickenzilla with the apple and fresh herbs. Pour on some olive oil and balsamic and rub. Rub on some sage and dried rosemary, salt and pepper. Roast for about an hour for an average size bird, or 90 minutes for a chickenzilla. Use a meat thermometer inserted into the fleshy inside part of the thigh up next to the breast. This is the last part of the bird to get done. Temp should read 180 when cooked for safety. The balsamic will caramelize a bit and give the skin a deep golden brown crispiness.

Honey-Sage Sweet Potatoes with Shallots
3 large shallots, peeled and quartered
2 giant sweet potatoes (about 3-1/2 pounds) peeled and diced
2 tbs. olive oil
1 tbs. brown sugar
2 tbs. honey or maple syrup would be even better
liberal shot of fresh ground pepper
coarse sea salt
2 tbs. chopped fresh sage

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Spray heavy baking sheet with cooking spray. Roast potatoes for about 40 minutes, turning at least twice to avoid burning. Toss all ingredients together and spread into one layer on baking sheet. They will be dark golden and crisp when done.

Over the past few days, total page views on public Small Farm Central sites surpassed 200,000. This time last year, Small Farm Central was just a concept so it is very rewarding to know that farmers have been able to 'tell their story' so many times using the software.

I hope for many more hits and farmers. We can do great things together as a community if we learn how to work together without compromising the individual integrity of each small farm; I hope Small Farm Central is a part of the puzzle that keeps farms economically viable into the future.

What kinds of people come to your website?A powerful exercise in web design is "scenario design" or "personas" -- these techniques help determine who visits your site and how you can serve them. To start, make a list of the type of people who will visit your farm website. Here are some examples to get you started on your own list:

• Farmer's Market customers
• Prospective employees
• CSA members
• Family members, friends, or neighbors
  
• The general internet population
• Local media learning about your farm
• Skeptical community members

Once you have created your list of possible visitor types, now write bullet points of particular tasks each persona may want to complete. To be really complete you could talk to a few people from each important group to see what they want from your website, but you will usually have a good general idea of what your visitors want from interacting with them in person over the years. An example list might look like this:

• CSA Members
• Contact the farm for alternate pick-up
• Choose what vegetables they will receive this week
• Read the latest newsletter
• View photos
• Find out what to expect in this week's box and for the rest of the season
• How to use that weird vegetable (what the heck is a Daikon Radish and how do I cook it?)
• Connect to other CSA members
• Other small-scale farmers
  

You may not be able to satisfy all the needs or wants of type of user depending on your commitment of time and resources to your web project, but it is an important baseline so you can select which type of visitor you serve and how they move through your site.

Now that you know what tasks need to be completed, list the features of your website and match up persona:task pairs as this simple example shows:

• Blog
• All personas: get recent information about the farm
• CSA members: connect to other CSA members (through comments)
• CSA members: read the latest newsletter
  
• Prospective employees: learn about the daily tasks on the farm
• Recipes
• CSA members: how to use that weird vegetable
• The general internet population: take information that they use in their area
• Other small-scale farmers: get recipes for their newsletters

Now you have a very structured way of prioritizing work on your website. Maybe you want to eventually list every variety of vegetable that you grow to show your customers the diversity of your farm, this is probably of lower priority than a photo gallery which connects customers to your farm in the first place. Prioritizing is especially important if you plan to do the web design work yourself because it takes an overwhelming task and makes each part a bite-size piece you can chew as time allows.

I don't have a specific set of features that I recommend for farm websites, but I believe the Small Farm Central feature set is expansive and suits the needs of most farmers. That list may be a good place for you start as you think of features that you would like on your website. We are constantly adding more! For example, at the behest of a member, we want to expand the "current products" section of the farm websites to allow farmers to add notes ("Garlic only available until Wednesday"), expiration dates, and explicitly link available varieties (we only have "Rosa Bianca" eggplant available this week).

Get started on your website this fall by starting a persona list and working up your features from there. You will probably think of visitors that you never considered before.

If you gained some insight from this installment of "Farming the Web" you may also be interested in last week's article,

Active and elegent farm web design is possible.

Keep in touch with us by getting each blog post in your inbox when we update.

Make a weekly schedule to write about the farm and good things will happen.Farm writing is almost always of value to customers. Your everyday experience of growing food is so outside of the experience of your readers that you will always be interesting if you write with passion, honesty, and photos. Blogging is an exercise of distilling your work and life into 500-1000 words that interests and motivates your customers to keep coming back to you each week and each year. Write about a particular challenge of the week (squash bugs, irrigation, drought?), the story of someone working on the farm, a particular variety. In the future I will post a list of starter blog ideas to get you writing when you don't have any ideas. If you devote a few hours each week to this throughout the year, I guarantee you will find more loyal and receptive customers; it is no longer an eggplant or a steak, the food is infused with your face and your voice.

Andy from Mariquita Farm in Watsonville, CA takes blogging to the next level by writing an "open letter from Mariquita Farm to everyone with a curiosity about the people, practices, and politics of farming." This is some of the best farm writing I have ever read in print or on screen. One commenter calls Andy "a most unique philosopher-farmer".

This week's article is entitled Water Under The Bridge and deals with Andy's start in agriculture delivering produce from Star Route Farm to the Veritable Vegetable Coop. I'll provide some excerpts to the article and go read it! I wouldn't expect each farmer to write a high-quality blog like Andy -- it is literature really -- but it is a wonderful example of how great writing can connect with people and customers and another role model to use as you write your own.

Vegetable information interspersed with personal experience:

"Truly fresh broccoli is a revelation. When I worked at Star Route Farm I didn’t earn much money, and I saved my wages for important things, like beer and toilet paper. ate everything I could from the fields. The first time I cut a head of broccoli and steamed it four minutes later, I was amazed . The broccoli had a sweetness I’d never tasted before. Any dressing or sauce would have only clouded the fresh purity of the flavor. But to deliver some facsimile of that green sweetness to a distant customer is tricky. As broccoli ages it begins to express the odor and flavor of the mustard oil that is a characteristic component of every member of the Brassica family, from arugula to broccoli to cabbage to kale."

Humor on visiting a late-night liquor store to get ice for the vegetables:

"One night when I got to the liquor store both lanes of Bayshore Boulevard were blocked by a couple of pimps with flashy cars. I don’t know for sure they were pimps. They could have been librarians dressed to kill, out for a night on the town in dark glasses and comporting themselves like fighting cocks, so that ignorant country boys like myself would presume they were successful pimps. The casual manner they took the whole street for their own was threatening. I parked behind them and stepped into the liquor store."

Go visit his blog, read, and start writing.

I am currently designing an e-commerce extension to the Small Farm Central software and I'd love to hear what you want to sell online and how I can serve you with this system. I currently will  support the following sales types:

• Mail Orders: This is classic ecommerce that would allow anyone in the world to order your value-added, shippable products.
• Restaraunt sales: Each restaurant has a unique username and password to log-in to your store where you list products available during a given week. The chef can reserve and pay for the items online and then arrange a drop-off.
• CSA Share Sales: Each spring thousands of CSAs sell shares to members - allow your members to pay online directly through your farm website.
• Buying Club Sales: Your weekly customers can pick their items through an online system so they get exactly what they want instead of the classic CSA system. This one is the most unformed in my head and I am not sure exactly how it will work or what type of farm it could serve. I am talking to Neil Stauffer of the Penn's Corner Farm Alliance this week about his ideas because he wants to run a service like this in 2008.
  

Are there any other types of sales that you would like your farm to be able to make online? If you want to be involved in the design process, please make your voice heard and many of your requirements will go directly into the software.

We are using Google Checkout which will allow you to create an immediate trust with your customers that is extremely important with credit card sales over the Internet. We will never hold your bank account information or the credit card numbers of your customers - we will allow Google to do the heavy lifting (and security) in this situation. The buying process will be completely on your Small Farm Central site, but when the customer is ready to checkout they will be sent to a Google site to finish the checkout process and then a link will allow them to come back to your farm website.

We are excited to bring this new product to you and hope that there will be some input from the community. There are several existing Small Farm Central members who are driving the development so far, but there is room for more voices. Leave a comment or contact us to get involved. This service will be up and running for the Christmas rush.