blogging

I am getting mixed signals today from around the Small Farm Central universe.

Circle A Garden in Montrose, Colorado writes in their blog:

Do I dare say that spring is here?? Maybe I should wait until after this next bit of weather goes on east!! This last week has been glorious; warm sunny days with just a few wisps of clouds overhead. The snow here has been rapidly melting; welcome to mud season!! Tommorow, though, the weatherman says it's supposed to snow here.

The photos look decidedly Spring-like:

The work has definitely begun. That Guy's Family Farm in Clarksville, Ohio is getting ready for their chicks by moving a brooder the three miles from Wilson farm.
That Guy's Family Farm crew looks like they are ready for another season of farming.

Brand new Small Farm Central member, Ibiwisi Alpacas in Putney, Vermont is having a little trouble believing that Spring is coming:

For those of you who live in New England, you get the drift (pun intended). How much more snow can we take? Where will be put it all? Stay tuned to find out...

I wonder if the alpacas are looking forward to Spring?

It is kidding season over at Hidden Springs Farms in Springfield, Tennessee:

At Poppy's Knob Farm in Boone, North Carolina, the farm is springing to life:

I am sure we'll get another cold spell this winter, but life is slowly returning to farms across the country. There is a lot of work and joy ahead of us this season. I look forward to watching all that growth through the blogs and sites of Small Farm Central's farmers because I will not be directly participating this year.

If you have a chance, go and connect with one of the farmers by leaving a comment on their blog. I am sure they would love to hear from you.

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Small Farm Central provides website and ecommerce service to direct-marketing farms of all types. Come get to a free demo to see what you are missing!

Seth Godin recommends that we start the year by running a Google search on ourselves.

How do you want your farm to be seen by customers who will idly search for you on the web? That search may come at a pivotal time in their local food life.

Let's say your small farm sells at farmer's markets. Picture a customer who has just started coming to the market and has bought food at different stands, but really likes your stand because you are friendly / organic / helpful / sustainable / tasty / attractive (pick one or more).

This customer is interested in your farm enough to remember the name, so they are sitting at work near the end of the day and they are considering a trip to the farmer's market that evening. They type your farm name into Google, not necessarily expecting anything to come back.

Do they find a professional, active website that explains the farm philosophy, encourages feedback, and gives the customer a view into the work that is done on the farm?

Does this fictional customer go to the farmer's market that evening? If so, what stand do they visit?

If you don't like what you see, plan what you are going to do about that in 2008. Start a blog, learn basic web design, or get a Small Farm Central site.

Photo by: asifthebes

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.

Now that you picked your domain and know where you are hosting the site, you are ready for the 3rd lesson in "Farming the Web." This week you will learn the basics of how your website should look.

I believe that small farm websites should be designed with simplicity and clarity that allows the distinctness of the farm to shine through the design. Most of the design story should be told with high-quality farm photographs of which each farm should have many because all farms have a aesthetic beauty that is unique to each farm. (In short: get a digital camera today and start taking photos if you aren't already.)

Be Simple, but be Clear

I talked to one farmer a few months ago who has an old, worn out website which he freely admits is past its time. He believes that this website helps him keep a low profile and seem more down-to-earth - he doesn't want too look too polished. I understand his position, but he has a special luxury since he has enough customers for his whole crop and doesn't worry about bringing new people in to the farm. The paradox of this situation is that he is very consistent about adding new content to the website from recipes to newsletters to photos. He spends at least a morning a week producing content for his newsletter and website. This is great, but due to the layout and navigation of the website it is almost impossible to find the photos or recipes unless you are receiving his newsletter. Farm websites should be clear, easy to navigate through, and have lots of content to connect the online visitor to the farm.
The Golden Earthworm farm website succeeds with elegant and simple web design.
The best way to describe good web design is to show good web design. Golden Earthworm Farm in Jamesport, NY illustrates the idea of clean navigation and a good use of photography. One idea in web usability in continuity; how does the user know he or she is on the same site when a new page is loaded? The Golden Earthworm site is so defined by the photos in the header that when they change on each page, I have a momentary confusion if I am on a new site. The header text does stay the same on each page, but the photos are so dominant that you only see the text if you are looking for it. Define a "template" for your site and stick to it. Otherwise, Golden Earthworm does a wonderful job of providing clean navigation and content.

Activate your Design

I don't want to be rude to anyone about their design, but the best way to demonstrate bad web design is to show bad web sites. There are a lot of pitfalls along the way -- I think I have hinted at some of them already. One mistake that almost every farm website makes is that the front page is not "now-oriented." This being 2007, not 1998, the bulk of you front page should not be an introduction to who you are, where you farm is, etc. The front page of your website should show change; either what you have just added to the site lately, your farm blog, or up-coming events. This is very important: let the visitor determine his or her own way through your content -- your job as a designer is not to force what you feel is important on your visitors. You should simply make it possible for the visitor to learn exactly as much about your farm as they need to.
Coyote Hill Farm web design needs to activate the front page of their website to entice visitors.
This is a difficult concept to convey, but take a look at this site (http://www.smallfarmcentral.com). I use a blog-style opening to my site -- so on any given day the first content that each user sees is different and often completely unrelated to the core business of website software for small farms (which you can freely demo). I allow the user to come to Small Farm Central for the information that they need and I try to tease people to connect further with the core business. For example on the front page, a visitor will most likely read the title of the blog entry first after reading the title of the site "Small Farm Central". If the article piques their interest, they may read it or start to look around to see who is providing this content. In the header on the front page I have a short 3-line introduction:

"Because you are a farmer and a business person -
Because you need to connect with your customers -
We do the technology so you don't have to."

and a short heading in the left column that is titled: "Small Farm Central is..." and links to more information about the core business. I trust myself to interest the visitor with the blog and allow the user to find their way through the site and give ample opportunity for further connection. If a visitor comes to site and reads the first paragraph of the blog and clicks the back button to go to where he or she came from, I am ok with that because I connected with that person for at least 30 seconds on a deeper level than "I am a web provider to small farms" which means nothing to most people. I hope they will remember the name and come back the next time they see a link somewhere.

This is a very important aspect of modern web and navigation design, in my opinion, and it takes a paradigm shift and trust. Just remember as you are going along in your web design process: the users of your website are smart - they will learn about you as long as you make it easy to get that information. Your first job as a web designer is to get the interest of the visitors - you have about 15 seconds to do this before they click the back button. There is much more to learn about web design and specifically farm web design so I will continue to cover these topics in the next few weeks.

Want more "Farming the Web"? Use the form in the left column of the website to subscribe to email updates of the blog.

Last Week: Hosting Options
Next Week: Design (Advanced): what does my customer want?

Rancho Gordo holds the beans.I talked with Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo last week about his web marketing strategy and how it drives his business. I introduced Steve in a post last week, so I won't rehash the introduction too much. Steve travels Mexico and Central America in search of rare and unusual dried beans. He brings them back to his farm in Napa, California to test and then brings only the tastiest varieties to markets, restaurants, and his Internet store. Since I focus on web marketing issues here at Small Farm Central, I talked to him about his blog and how it relates to his marketing and overall business.

When did you start the Rancho Gordo blog and why?

I started the blog in November of 2006 and I am not really sure how or why it continued. I guess I just had a creative itch and I felt like I had something to say and the blog went from there. It was intuitive for me, so I did it. If it doesn't make sense to you, don't do it. I started out posting sporadically and lately I have settled on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. I sit down one afternoon every two weeks and just start writing. I shut out the world and good things happen. If I interrupted myself every two or three days to write the blog, I think that would be disruptive. I am passionate about food, so I write about beans and the subjects that interest me; it would be very difficult and boring for me to write about computer parts, for example.

What is the best part about running a blog?

You control the story. I have had several newspaper articles done about the farm and the reporter always gets something wrong. With my blog, I write it exactly how I want it and then the public reads my story. Earlier this year I posted some blog articles about a disagreement I had with Slow Foods. I was able to tell my story as I saw it and continue posting as more information became available. This series of articles eventually led to the blog and this disagreement being mentioned twice in the San Francisco Chronicle. Business went way up and has stayed there since.

Who reads your blog?

I get about 300-500 unique visitors to the site each day. This is mostly a local phenomenon, but people from all over the country read it too. Most of the time I think no one is reading the blog and then someone comes up to me at a farmer's market and tells me that they love a recipe or they really supported me in the Slow Foods incident and that makes me feel like my voice is being heard. I've noticed that the longer I do this that my blog shows up in the search results more often for all kinds of things, so I just focus on content and let the rest fall into place. Over the years, I have built a mailing list of 3,000 email addresses which helps get the word out about the blog and my business.

Great blog photography. How does your e-commerce work?

I run my web store through dotcomdesigners.com, I believe it costs about $50/month and then the extra 2% or so of sales that goes directly to the credit card company. I used to sell through Local Harvest's online store and just tack on an extra dollar to each bag to account for the fee. This was good just to check things out because there is no investment, but I wanted more control over the look of the e-store.

How does the revenue split for your farm between farmer's markets, restaurants, and Internet sales?

It is in thirds. The market share of sales has been declining while the Internet sales are going up. I'm lucky to sell a value-added product that ships really well; this is ideal for Internet sales. I think all farms should be producing something that is value added if only to sell in the off-season. The added benefit is these items can ship and you can get a market on the Internet. I also make a little money on the Amazon affiliate program; about $30/quarter. Basically it allows me to advertise relevant books and music and I get a little take of any sale that Amazon makes from my links. More than anything, this helps me connect with people who have read the same book I have. It validates me with certain people. In the future, I am going to review books and then put a link to the amazon site at the bottom of the post.

Do you have any other advice to give farmers who are considering blogging or a website?

Make time to do this - a website that is only updated once every three months is boring. If you can't make the time to update regularly, don't do it. Recipes are a really big driver of my sales. Each time I post a recipe for one of my beans, I can see that bean take off in sales. So be passionate about what you are selling, tell people how to use it and be specific. People don't know how to cook anymore. I'll post a recipe that says a dash of this and a handful of this and people want know exactly how many tablespoons or cups of each ingredient, so I'm going to post the general idea of what to do with a recipe and then put some absolute numbers to that in the future. Stay focused -- pick your topic and write about it but don't stray into your personal affairs too much if this is meant to be your small business blog.

Thanks to Steve Sando for allowing me to interview him. Check out his website and blog at:
Rancho Gordo

The latest news is that the spat with Slow Foods got Steve a book deal. He is currently putting the finishing touches on Heirloom Beans: Recipes from Rancho Gordo. Hopefully we'll hear more from Steve in the future because I think he is a great example to any farmers looking to branch out into online marketing successfully.

See also:
Rancho Gordo does farm marketing the right way