Meet Brennan of The Lower Ninth Ward Urban Farming Coalition

The Lower Ninth Ward Urban Farming Coalition is dedicated to community revitalization through urban agriculture and is comprised of local groups and individuals committed to food security and environmental responsibility through urban agriculture.

They are working to enable food justice through establishing a sustainable food system in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood in which there are no grocery stores and limited healthy food options.

Lower Ninth Ward Urban Farming Coalition Small Farm Central Website

Brennan's Thoughts on Websites & Outreach

We thought we'd take a few moments to ask Brennan some questions about their organization & their experience with Small Farm Central.

Did you have a website before SFC?
The coalition did not have a website or web presence before the SFC website.

Who is the intended audience of your website?
We built the website to highlight our work and share its intentions and successes with others in the urban agriculture world, New Orleans, and internationally. We've been contacted on all of these fronts by a whole world of people; from volunteers to supporters, to funders, to experts on this or that. Its been an incredible resource for the Coalition.

What advice would you give to a farm who is considering starting up their first website?
My advice to new organizations is to get yourself out there on the web. It's wonderful to see your achievements highlighted through photos and to reach a whole world of people. Small Farm Central is so easy to use and even within its members, has such diversity and a wealth of knowledge to be shared.

What is your favorite part of being involved with sustainable food community?
Working in New Orleans through urban agriculture has given new life to the rebuilding efforts of this city. The community of growers and growing growers is growing! and we're so happy to be a part of it.

In early 2008, Kevin Kelly, a prominent digital technology thinker, wrote an article entitled "1,000 True Fans" in which he argued that new communication technologies allow artists and musicians to thrive in a whole new way than before. Instead of artists being reliant on the blockbuster, break-out hit, they can instead nurture a group of committed "fans" that will spend money often and reliably to create a steady stream of income for the artist.

Kelly writes,

"A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans."

Applied to agriculture, this "true fan" sounds a whole lot like a CSA member.

CSA members are willing to do certain things that no other rational consumer will do: pay up-front as much as 6 months in advance for produce, accept weather-related losses, take whatever produce is in season at the farm, buy all their fresh food from one farmer, and on and on. It takes a lot of trust and the mind-set of a true fan to be a CSA member.

Of course, the CSA member expects a lot from your farm: the freshest produce, the highest quality, a discount over market prices, a newsletter of what is going on at the farm, or a good conversation at the pick-up site.

The CSA is a bargain that benefits both the farmer and the member. As a farmer you are eliminating some of the marketing headaches of the direct marketing small farm, but there are a lot of responsibilities in this relationship. Namely, keeping your membership happy week after week and year after year.

Kelly explains the challenges and rewards of this set-up:

"The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient. "

So, beyond providing a stellar product, the key is to keep your fans (ahem, CSA members) happy and engaged by communicating the difficulties and joys of growing their food. Your website and newsletter is a key part of that effort -- these technologies that we have at our fingertips allow us to keep CSA members in the loop at a very low cost. The unique story of your farm and individual relationships with customers will keep them coming back year after year.

We have one Member Assembler farm that opens their CSA sign-up at midnight on Sunday morning in March and sells 350 shares by that Sunday evening (almost their entire membership quota) with full payment taken at the sign-up. That is the kind of following we should all be striving for.

It should be noted that I am not suggesting that each farm needs 1000 CSA members. The number of CSA members that you need is the number members that would support the farmer and farm at a decent wage year-round, so this number will be different for every scale and locale.

The CSA concept, and in a larger sense, the "1000 true fan" concept, allows us to do what we love whether that is farming or playing the bass guitar without constantly struggling for one-off sales at the farmers market, a huge blockbuster, or the big wholesale contract.

Meet Don and Daphne of Zephyros Farm & Garden: Paonia, Colorado

Zephyros Farm & Garden is a small diversified family farm that grows certified organic vegetables and flowers for the Aspen & Telluride farmer's markets, local restaurants and for their CSA. They are dedicated to promoting biodiversity through their seed choices for many of their plants. In the spring, they provide a wide selection of Certified Organic vegetable and herb starts.

Zephyros Farm & Gardens Small Farm Central Website

Don chose the Photogenic premium template for his website which shows off his great photos of farm dinners and farm animals. Visit their site at http://www.zephyrosfarmandgarden.com.

Don's Thoughts on Websites & Farming

We thought we’d take a few moments to ask them some questions about their farm & their experience with Small Farm Central.

How long have you been working with Small Farm Central?
We have been with Small farm Central from the beginning; we were one of the original sites as we met Simon right as he was getting ready to launch this idea.

Did you have a website before SFC?
We did not have a website before our SFC website. The setting up of our first website through SFC made it really easy. I have always received prompt answers to my questions and been able to make things work for me quickly.

You recently switched from a Basic Template to a Premium Template. Can you describe what that process was like?
The process of switching to a premium template was easier then I ever imagined. I had it up and running in almost no time. It also revived my interest in the website which had diminished after a long hard season.

What advice would you give to a farm who is considering starting up their first website?
I would tell a farm to use the SFC system as it has many features that are great for the business of farming and for business in general. It is important to have a website that is dynamic and evolving which is what I am able to do easily with my SFC site.

What is your favorite part of being a farmer?
I truly love watching long term crops, from seed to root cellar, and being able to pull it out again almost a year after it had begun and eating it knowing all of its lifecycle.

On the SPIN farming email group there was an interesting exchange between farmers about how to deal with problematic (well-meaning or not) visitors. This is likely more of a problem in urban areas where density of population and interest in small-scale farming bring out all kinds of people. Even if you are not an urban farm, situations may occur like this where a single customer occupies busy selling times at a farmers market.

Paige in Austin, Texas has a really good approach of creating a "Standard Operating Procedure" that helps separate the farmer from the specific situation:

My method is to note when we encounter a new "problematic situation" and then devise a "standard operating procedure." This allows me to separate myself personally from the difficult message I'm delivering to the person, and allows me to be really nice to them rather than act annoyed or in a hurry.

It depends on how much of a "business" your operation is. We're not only working to farm and make money for our household, but we're devising methods to help train farmers who want to run an extension of our yard based neighborhood farms, so we have to create procedures and best practices to teach others. This includes dealing with interruptions and other things that create problems.

Those will be different for everyone depending on the operation you've set up. But generally speaking:

1. identify your problem,
2. think about how you'd prefer the situation go,
3. consider any legal ramifications if applicable, and
4. create a standard procedure for how you will handle the situation.

Then you can "blame the procedure" rather than anyone taking it personally.

Example:
"I'd really love to chat with you right now, and I'm so glad you've stopped by, but we can only give tours on Saturday mornings so the farmers can focus on the harvest during the week. Please do come back, and feel free to visit the website to fill out our contact form if you'd like to get weekly news about special events."

While I was at the Southeast Strawberry Expo in Durham, NC I came across farmers marketing their products via Craigslist. This is an interesting way to market farm products because I normally think of Craigslist as a place to sell a used bike or advertise an apartment rental.

If you are not familiar with Craigslist, it is a simple, free classifieds board focused on a single city or area. It is also one of the largest and most heavily used sites on the web. There are Craigslist pages for most metropolitan areas across the United States and many classified categories from automobiles to lost-and-found notices.

I found this posting on the Raleigh, NC Craigslist site listing "U-pick" turnips and greens:

Though posting your farm products on Craigslist will only work if you serve a metropolitan area, I think it could be a successful strategy especially for time sensitive postings like "U-Pick" strawberries, coupons, or anything that customers can take action on quickly. If you end up using Craigslist to advertise your products, please let us know how it goes.