SEATTLE © 2006 Barbara Adams www.BarbaraBerstAdams.com Below are 12 cottage industries that have successfully partnered with micro eco-farms.* They allow other farm family members, such as those who love to host or cook, to use their creativity productively, even if the added home business wouldn't otherwise financially stand on its own. From a home quilt shop to children's nature classes, the home cottage industry and micro eco-farm cross-promote each other, accelerating the success of each while decelerating the work, time and money needed to market each business.

• Cooking or artisan food crafting workshops on the farm: The owners of Sweet Grass Dairy in Georgia raise grass fed dairy cows and goats, and teach a popular cheesemaking class on the farm. This allowed one of the farm's owners, who'd always had a desire to pursue professional cooking, to add income to his farm with a fun related sideline career. The classes draw more revenue for the farm's products while they attract new and returning customers. Today, there are countless lost cooking arts and many may include your farm's ingredients. Cooking is hugely popular with both genders. What once started with a single "TV chef" television show has boomed into an entire Food station with millions of viewers. Your farm can tap into this demand with workshops that can't be found elsewhere

• Selling an on-farm created recipe: Online marketing has opened up the world as customers for your secret family salsa made from your farm's heirloom tomatoes, or jam made from your farm's rare quince fruit, or your homebaked goods, such as cookies, made from your grass-fed dairy and eggs.

• Children's enrichment camps, tours and nature workshops: There's a growing movement to restore the "village" that once passed ancient, unique and local skills on to children who show a natural interest. Farms can offer the perfect atmosphere for you to develop a business providing workshops for children. Lattin Farms in Nevada is operated by several family members, some of whom are also certified teachers. They have created great ongoing children's programs for kids to learn about pollination, animals, food harvesting, and much more. And New Hampshire's HeartSong Farm's teaches nature and spirit camps to kids, allowing them to recognize herbs and make healing potions and tinctures. Within the public school community, there is a growing movement to connect schoolchildren with their local farms. When kids visit as a field trip, paying a certain cost per head, they pay you for a good days' work leading the tour, and go home to begin a huge positive promotional campaign for the farm by telling friends, neighbors, family and relatives.
  

• Lost art workshops for adults: During this age of "high tech/high touch balance," adults are seeking out those who remember how to quilt, knit, make kitchen cosmetics and gain deep wisdom of the herbal kingdom to share. HeartSong Farm holds many popular classes for adults on herbal lore and knowledge. And on-farm quilting and knitting shops that offer classes and supplies are very popular with rural craft enthusiasts

• Healing services: Anyone in your farming family or partnership pursuing a sideline of massage, Reiki or other bodywork therapies? These are great partners with innovative eco-farms, either given by a farm owner, or a room rented to other therapists. People love coming to Washington's Island Meadow Farm for Reiki sessions. Pelindaba Lavender Farm, a lavender farm also on a Washington State island, has rented an older on-farm building to a group of local bodywork therapists who turned it into a full on-farm day spa named "Lavendera."

• Farm as event place or atmosphere: Do you like to host and create beautiful ambiance for special events or workshops, but don't find yourself fond of teaching? Team up with others who like to periodically teach art or other unique workshops, or want to put on events. People will sometimes come to workshops, events or classes as much for the environment as for the classes. I've attracted people to writing classes, and even to a wedding (!) when they were mildly interested in the event, but the historical or nature setting made the event even more attractive. Split the workshop revenue with someone who teaches writing, art or craft workshops, or otherwise classes not related to farming. Give it time, but once several people have come to the farm for pleasant workshops or events, word of mouth promotion for your farm is usually greatly accelerated, and an added bonus to the extra revenue. As already mentioned, with all business ventures, check zoning and other regulations, be certain about your liability protection insurance, and don't be afraid to start small if you choose to pursue the business of allowing the farm to be an event location. Island Meadow Farm owners started with a two-hour, six person writers' workshop and grew into upwards of 60 people enjoying harvest festivals and women's spiritual retreats.

• Team up with a specific crafter for mutual promotion: Not all sideline farm businesses need to bring people to the farm. Find an off-farm crafter who can tie your farm's crops into his or her craft, such candles scented with your jasmine and lemon verbena. They become a regular customer for your crops. Plus, they benefit by saying that their products are made with crops from your local eco-farm, which promotes your farm many times over

• A personal chef business: The career of the cook who works out of his or her own home, and is hired to cook for families or for special home gatherings is growing in popularity. This career works well with a farm that grows ethnic, gourmet or heirloom crops

• Handmade bodycare products: Pelindaba Farm, mentioned above, grows its own organic lavender, distills it on the farm, and makes a line of bodycare products sold to spas and individuals. They sell online and through their on-farm gift store. Pelindaba's products are non-perishable, allowing them to wait longer for customers to find them. For those with herbs and/or dairy animals, herbal or milk soaps and bath salts with herbs and dried milk fit into the nonperishable bodycare category. While soaps made from goat or sheep milk are becoming more commercially available, your farm can avoid competing with the commercial by attaching a story to your niche product. Offer high-enough priced soaps made from the milk of Bessy the rare breed Guernsey cow, or Petunia and Pansy, the rare Nigerian dwarf goats, and sell the story of the happy and natural lives your dairy animals live. This story is part of the soap product and plugs into the consumer trend to want our purchases to make a positive difference to the earth and local economy. Once a year, hold an open house that allows visitors to experience the milk to soap story, and to pet Petunia, which brings an experience and credibility to your products that no mass -produced product can compete with. Non-perishable allow you to use surplus milk during the heavy milking season, and have a non-perishable product to sell during the dry season, allowing (and selling the idea of) your animals to take their seasonal rest as nature intended. There is also a market for just-picked and freshly handmade facial and bodycare products. For example, check out The Herbal Home Spa for dozens of recipes for facial steams, scrubs, masks, lip balms; massage oils, baths, rubs, wraps; hand, nail, and foot treatments, shampoos, dyes, and conditioners. Fresh cucumber and pumpkin are examples of farmed crops known as skin rejuvenators. Clary sage, chamomile, peaches, yogurt, and other fresh perishables that can't be purchased anywhere else in the bodycare industry and can become high-end value-added farm products. When grown eco-friendly and handcrafted as one-of-a-kind to its customers, the value and price of such products grows. The trick for farmed products that are this unique, though, is plugging into an ongoing purchaser or purchasers, such as a local well-established spa or day spa, or a private bodycare practitioner with established clients who specializes in fresh, "live" skin care products. Nonperishable products can store for weeks while you market them to a variety of customers, but perishables won't last, and need to be funneled immediately into a waiting market. You may want to talk over a specific recipe with a day spa partner until you find one that works, and grow from there.

• The micro-ranch/fiber artist combination: Woolly Wabbit® Farm is the winner of the micro-iest microfarm found so far. The owner raises angora rabbits in a bedroom of her apartment! From this, she has created an online storefront business selling wool products and information products on the handspun wool cottage industry. The market for natural fibers from humanely raised farm animals continues to grow. Wools from various animals are naturally fire retardant, and have qualities that no other synthetic fiber can offer. Angora rabbit, Angora goat, Shetland sheep, and alpacas are all good possibilities for the handspinning niche. While alpacas are relatively new to the scene, be sure to watch the trends and don't copycat what's already being done… including the purchase of high priced animals to hopefully sell to others. These types of 'cool-new-animal' fads usually peak, over-saturate, produce unhealthy imbred mistakes with no humane home to be raised in, go through the "shaking off" stage, and then settle into a well-grounded market for a few who continue to raise them, and for the others like you who find niches within the mainstream market. Find a local outlet for infant blankets, or custom weave or knit items marketed to those who find money to be no issue. Let them choose which of your animals's wool, all of whom have names, of course, from which they'd like a sweater to be knitted.

• The "occasional" festival event: Some people love to put on festivals… but only once or twice a year. Their farming neighbors may be involved in ongoing agritourism, but you prefer just the occasional celebration, and then letting things stay quiet on the farm. Other farms put on yearly herb festivals, fairy celebrations (for kids and adults!), local antique festivals where other non-competing farmers are invited, harvest festivals, Easter and May Day celebrations, and ethnic gatherings.

• Garden or farm-made candles: What? Candles are already everywhere for cheap prices. People always have and always will love them. Don't compete with the cheapies. Start, of course, with healing and eco-friendly ingredients, beeswax, soy wax, natural bayberry wax, zinc wicks instead of lead. Then produce something unique to your farm. Frederickson's Herb Farm offers custom-made candles inside the customer's own chosen cherished container, such as a piece of family heirloom china. They also offer candles that capture the essence of their own gardens, and custom aroma candles. Pelindaba Lavender Farm handcrafts lavender-scented candles in a wide variety of popular shapes and sizes which sell online and direct from their farm.