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Scott is offering a Christmas Special to readers of The Growing Edge. Until December 26, save 25% on all his books — you can get ‘Bootstrap Market Gardening: How to Start-up, Market and Manage a Successful Small Farm Business‘ and all the bonuses for $35.25 rather than the $47 everyone else pays. Be sure to enter the code ‘Xmas25′ in the discount code box at checkout to get the 25% off to Growing Edge readers.
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Market gardening is a great business! Despite the economy, or unemployment, or whatever the ’scare of the day’ is, people still need to eat. And more and more of them are choosing small local farms as their supplier of choice for fresh, naturally grown food.
So I would recommend market gardening to any small property owner looking to make a living. However . . . market gardening will only succeed as a business, if you approach it as a business. This means there’s lots of work to do before you start throwing some seeds in the ground.
You may be thinking, ‘this guy is gonna spoil my fun, I just want to grow stuff’! Trust me, a little fore-thought here will save you headaches down the road.
What, specifically, do I mean by that? Simply that market gardening, like any other small business, needs to put planning before marketing, and marketing before management. And all of this needs to happen before production – i.e. growing your crop. What do each of these steps consist of?
Planning consists of setting targets for sales, expenditures and income. You need to figure out how much money you need to make, and where it will come from? How much of what product do you expect to sell, and to whom? What is your cost of sales? How much will you net, after paying for equipment, supplies and labour? You need to have a good handle on these factors before starting the next stage, Marketing.
Marketing is simply to telling the story of your farm business in a way that is appealing to the people you want as customers. The best marketing approach for a small business is a targeted one. This means you want to start out aimed at the folks most likely to buy what you are selling ( this is why you have to figure out who those people might be in the Planning stage). You keep marketing until you have identified enough potential customers to hit those sales and income targets.
Remember you are ’sorting’, not ‘convincing’; that is, you are trying to sort the people ready to buy from you NOW, from those that aren’t. ‘Convincing’ is expensive, and is best left to the brand names; ’sorting’ can be very cost-effective, if you have targeted your market correctly. My two main marketing mediums are mail-out flyer’s to local communities (I send out one or two mailings of a 1-page flyer each spring) and my web-site. With both mediums, people subsequently come to me looking for what I have for sale; in other words they are good ’sorting mechanisms.’
After you have a handle on the ‘who’ and ‘how much’ of selling your stuff, you need to think about Management. This means putting all the processes in place to run your business and provide your customers what they expect. This involves (among other things) figuring out how to handle customer service and communications, dealing with your hired help, and keeping track of what’s working and what’s not in your business.
Morale of the story, the more of this stuff you figure out before you break ground, the more likely you are to succeed in the market gardening game.
About the Author
Scott Kelland is a former management consultant specializing in Planning and Performance Management, and is the owner of award-winning New Terra Farm near Merrickville, Ontario. Scott is the author of ‘Bootstrap Market Gardening, How to Start-up, Market and Manage a Successful Small Farm Business’. Christmas special, just for the readers of Growing Edge: save 25% on ‘Bootstrap Market Gardening’ until December 26. Go to this link; click on ‘add to cart’ and be sure to enter the code ‘Xmas25′ in the discount code box.
Hydroponics Dictionary
