MARKETING: Using fliers for farm marketing? Perhaps you’re announcing the opening of your roadside stand or soliciting customers for an on-farm festival or u-pick season. Here are some tips to help your fliers benefit your farm marketing campaign:
People in general don’t stop to read lengthy text-book looking fliers with lots of small type or clutter. Put the main benefit to the passersby in clean bold print: “Local Blueberry U-Pick Now Open.”
Use light paper with dark print. Professionally made fliers and posters can sometimes get away with white print on dark paper, but avoid this unless a professional is doing it for you.
In smaller but clean, easy-to-read print or graphics, make sure the five Ws and one H are included once people stop to read. If any of the following information is already in your main headline, no need to repeat: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. Who are the farm owners & their contact information, What is the farm’s name and what crops or experiences are being offered that’s not already in your headline (type of blueberries, pony rides or free blueberry recipes for u-pickers), When is the u-pick open, Where is it located, Why would customers want to participate, and How do customers participate (make appointment a day in advance, just drop by during open hours with your own containers… thanks for leaving pets at home…)
Avoid cluttering the flier with lots of little bits of graphics or fluff. A single attractive largish graphic can do the trick, such as a luscious photo of your blueberries.
Sketch out a rough design then put it up on a wall and stand back to see if you can read the main headline from six feet away, and if it looks balanced and neat.
Have another person with fresh eyes look over the final flier for typos before printing copies. Farm marketing with fliers is effective when done intelligently.
— www.MicroEcoFarming.com
AGRITOURISM — It’s not just young and newbie small-scale farmers who embrace agritourism to help their farm’s profit. The long-time small-scale farming community is also restoring its rural livelihood with agritourism as well.
Here’s Farmer Bob Ricci in his own words about his journey back to full time farming:
My great-grandpa homesteaded our farm in 1888. My father planted a small strip of sweet corn for me in 1982. I was nine years old. I sold the corn on the side of our country road much like that of a lemonade stand. This little business of mine slowly grew over the years until the time came for me to go off to college in Pullman. I drove home every weekend during the fall (with the exception of home Cougar football games!) After graduation, I returned home and expanded to wholesaling my corn to Safeway. This was a great deal of work on top of running the dairy with my dad. We were a dairy farm until 2001 when my father made the tough decision to sell our cows. This turned into a blessing in disguise.
I added a pumpkin patch and a corn maze that year. The biggest addition that year was turning our calf barn built in 1898 into a country store. This was a fantastic improvement over our little corn stand we used for the previous 15 years. However without the dairy, I had to get a full time job off the farm to support my new family. I figured I would only have to work both jobs for maybe 2-3 years until our farm operation could support us. A funny thing happened during those next few years, my wife Sarah and I kept having one daughter after another. Each time we had a new baby girl, I would tell my employer that they had me for at least another year. I dare not leave a good job with full medical and dental! Well nearly 8 years and 5 daughters later, I finally was able to leave my job April 30, 2009.
This was my first season completely focused on the farm, and what a difference it made. We increased our revenue by 35% even with a soggy October. I could not have done it without the blessing of the Good Lord, the help of my amazing wife Sarah and my parents and our dedicated group of volunteers. The Snohomish Festival of Pumpkins and the NABC (Northwest Agriculture Business Center) have also played a major part in this story as well. I am absolutely living my dream.
Our goals for this next year include traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania for the North American Farm Direct Marketing Association conference to get new ideas for our farm. We would like to add more attractions to entertain our visitors.
TRENDS: The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association reported that organic beef sales had a steady rise and peaked in the 2008 recession, and have again rebounded, hitting levels at 14 percent higher at mid-2009 than they were a couple of years previous. One farmer noted that people buying her grass-fed beef weren’t “elite,” nor buying it because of health scares. Rather, it appears many buyers were middle and lower class, and just wanted to be ecologically responsible.
For the small scale farming community following the threat to enforce expensive control devises on every farm animal in the country (making it easier for farm factories and more difficult for micro farming and small scale farming), that idea has been successfully opposed and has been suspended.
As consumers get more sophisticated in regenerative small scale farming, they’re understanding the differences between free-range, grass-fed, and grass-finished, and appreciating the latter over the other two choices. Expect this trend to grow.
For those interested in grass-fed cattle for beef or dairy on small scale farming or micro farming plots, our article on mini cattle breeds at the Center for the Micro Eco-Farming Movement under the animal profile library may be of interest.
— www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO – TRENDS – VALUE-ADDED: A micro-sized woodlot can be a valuable business asset for the eco-micro farm and those involved in small scale farming. ATTRA – National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, PO Box 3657, Fayetteville, AR 72702; Phone: 1-800-346-9140 — FAX: (479) 442-9842, http://attra.ncat.org offers a publication entitled “Woodlot Enterprises.”
“Backyard Woods,” from the Arbor Day Foundation is a small guide showing how to plant a safe, earth enhancing forest for owners of one to 10 acres. The Foundation states that 49 percent of the earth’s forests are in private ownership, and those that own backyard sized woods make up 60 percent of all USA private forest landowners. Smaller parcels of wooded areas individually and collectively make a big impact on the planet.
Then learn to coppice: Coppicing is an old European method of harvesting firewood without killing the trees, and while maintaining the health of a diversified forest. Various information is appearing on the web, you’ll have to search in your area.
Backyard firepits are extremely popular, but so is “going green” and saving trees. A micro farm’s ecologically stewarded woodlot can provide eco-friendly firewood (dense hardwoods properly cured produce the least pollution), along with being a carbon bank and wildlife habitat which helps attract customer loyalty. A woodlot can also be an agritourism draw for birdwatchers or for workshops – teach coppicing workshops – a rare and valuable skill. Plant “U-choose” tree seedlings around the edges as another crop for sale, and if you’re in the USA, plant native mountain mint in the sunnier edges for honeybees. Value-added products such as natural bug repellent and carpet freshener have been made from this plant, and deer don’t care for it. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: 
Researchers at West Virginia University created a natural bee source of supplemental food that appears to interrupt the reproduction cycle of varroa bee mites without harming bees if done correctly.
It was fed at the entrance and broodnest. It’s believed the nurse bees feed it to the larvae, and it eventually gets into all the communal food supply and then to the mites. Experiments that seemed to do the best at this writing used 25 drops of wintergreen, spearmint, rosemary or peppermint essential oils mixed into a pint of honey put into a quart jar, then filling the jar with very warm water (too hot evaporates the oils), and mixing well. More experiments are underway.
Problems for the honey bees occurred when the essential oils at the bottom of the feeder which hadn’t completely dispersed were eaten. True essential oils (vs. culinary or fragrance oils, which can kill bees), must be used. Straight essential oils can also kill and are too strong for the bees. Timing is critical and other ways of killing mites directly with essential oils for highly infested hives are being experimented with, and some results were reported. This url leads to further information: http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/varroa/varroa2.htm#Revised. – www.microecofarming.com