Balancing Retail & Wholesale Markets with Joe from Dirty Girl Produce
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're excited to host Joe Schirmer of Dirty Girl Produce again for a 1 year in review. Listen as Joe shares the changes and updates he's made to the business and how he's serving both wholesale and retail markets.
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Rory: 0:26
Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory, your host. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our farm advisors, Joe Schirmer. Welcome, Joe.
Joe: 0:37
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Rory.
Rory: 0:39
It's great to have you back almost one year, since you kind of first came on the podcast. Before we get too into things for those who may not have listened to you the last time you're on the Direct Farm Podcast. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and some of your background and your farm?
Joe: 0:57
Sure. Yeah. My name's Joe Schirmer. I live in Santa Cruz, California, and I farm in Watsonville on four parcels. We have 42 acres. We grow anywhere from, I say 40 different things. But when you look on our Barn2Door list, we have about 120 items you can buy. So that's different and yeah, we have organic veggies. We've been doing it a long time, since '96. And we just hustle at farmer's markets. We work retail here and there. We do wholesale here and there. We have a bunch of restaurant accounts and we just kinda link it together. And of course now we're doing local deliveries and pickup sites for farm boxes and different kind of generic stuff.
Rory: 1:39
Awesome. Well, your farm has maintained an organic certification for quite some time. Now, could you maybe kind of talk about what that certification says about your products and also why that's a priority for you and your farm?
Joe: 1:51
Yeah. I think that certainly organic certification is really important because it's the only clear defined legal term in farming that we can really use, right. Even though there's a lot of people that are say further on the side of organic that say, well, these standards aren't strong enough, but for me, it is a line and we can fight over what gets allowed and what doesn't get allowed and what rules are used. So I've always been a big advocate of organic and certifying organic. It costs a little bit, and it takes a lot of work to get it done, but it you get a lot of it refunded anyway, through the USDA. So there's really not too much to complain about when it comes to money and unless you're a giant farm and you only get refunded $750, but I think it's $750, you get refunded. And you've got to write a little booklet every year. You know, you gotta, you gotta do the paperwork. If you don't do the paperwork, you're not organic. And so, I think a lot of people don't like that part of it. But I'm really into it. I love being organic. CCOF started really writing the rules way back when, in California, a couple decades ago. And then that's really what's fed into the USDA national organic standards. So I liked being a part of CCOF and being a part of the organic movement, you know, it's, it's something to talk about. And I have a lot of my neighbors here in farming neighbors that aren't organic. And so I can say, well, you know, all you gotta do is switch this out of your boom and do this. And a couple change things. It's basically a purchase more than anything else. And then of course doing the work of record keeping.
Rory: 3:26
I think the two things that you mentioned both there is, it's usually cost money and it's kind of time-consuming to do so it's definitely cool to hear your perspective on why that can be worth it. And maybe not as expensive as farmers might think. You also in your local community, you mentioned kind of where you guys are farming in California. You were formally involved as the President of the Board of Directors for the Santa Cruz Community Farmer's Market. Which I understand you're not doing anymore, but you're currently sit on the Board of Directors for the Center for Urban Education on Sustainable Agriculture. So could you maybe talk about how kind of being active in your community is a priority for you and And how that's kind of helped shape Dirty Girl Produce and yourself as well.
Joe: 4:04
Sure. I think being on the political side of everything, if you can, sitting on boards not just to get, you know, your opinion heard. But also to learn, I've learned so much, I'm on the board of the Santa Cruz Farmer's Markets right now. I'm not the president. I'm kind of sit back and it's a nice thing to have a zoom call that's one of the things I hope to keep. But also on the board of CUESA, which is at the ferry building in San Francisco. I'm not on that board anymore, but I was for a while and, you know, we hired an executive director and we started farmers markets in the city of San Francisco. I mean, it did some pretty big things, a lot of big fundraisers and a lot of, for me, a lot of learning, you know, I really learned a lot about Marketing and PR and working with professionals that are lawyers and architects and doctors and people that have gotten really successful in their fields. And of course all the farmers, you know, I mean, great, great group of farmers that are hugely successful and kind of mentors to me were on that board. So it was, it was just really good for me to spend time and to be taken serious. And people say like, oh, I think Joe should do that. I'm like, what really, me? Wow! You know, so if anything, it felt flattering to, you know, someone to ask you to sit on a board like that. When I did sit on the board of CUESA in San Francisco, I'd have to drive up there and now you don't have to drive up. You can do a zoom call. It's so funny. The difference just a few years has made. So, I think that it'd be much more approachable nowadays for people to sit on boards. You know, especially if you're rural and the board of directors of some farmer's market organizations, I think are really important and easy, you know, if you can just zoom call in or even call and you know, with the teleconference machine, which allows people have pretty easy. Learn about business learn about nonprofits. And whenever there's so many good nonprofits around farming that needs the voices heard of people that are actually doing the work, you know?
Rory: 5:53
Yeah, that's cool to hear too. Cause I know sometimes, like you said, that that can be a big time commitment. Cause that can be a big market opportunity too, just to kind of help get their name out there as well. So it's kind of been a little over a year, I think, since you were last on the Direct Farm Podcast how has the last year been for your farm and what have been some maybe first let's start with some of the challenges that you guys have kind of faced in the last year.
Joe: 6:16
You know, when retail and restaurants have dropped out our wholesale has picked up and there's new, a lot of companies that do deliveries and there's a lot of different kind of businesses out there caters. And, and so we've just kind of, you know, run around and been adjusting. And of course, the last few months here in the Bay Area, California, San Francisco Bay Area. The restaurants are coming back and they've been coming back in a big way and it's been great because we've really adjusted our whole system for restaurants, putting orders in, you know, we started, when we first moved over to Barn2Door, the big push was that, you know, all the restaurants were closed, or about to close and we wanted to do farm boxes. And so we were delivering and picking up, and that was just huge and busy. And so it's the same application that does that. There's just a different page for the restaurant wholesale. So it's been really good because it's given us time to work on our wholesale page. I call it wholesale/restaurant because we try to get all the restaurants and all those businesses in on that and ordering online. And so as everybody's come back, it's been slow and steady and we've gotten to figure it out. And now that everybody kind of jumped in, it's really, you know, I'm just helping people get on and get logged in and figure out how we're doing things. I mean, we're changing. We used to have like a really, no rules, 30 day aging scenario. We just write a paper receipt and hope that their accountant gets it and sends a check-in. I used to go in the Fall when things would slow down and I'd have this big bundle of invoice receipts. And I just start calling people and so, you know, I'm kind of done with that because we're really just having everybody pay for it when they placed the order and then they have to place the order within a certain amount of time. 10 o'clock the day before. That way we know, we have a heads up and it's just set in motion. It's going to save hours a week. I don't even know how many hours of text message, email, phone call back and forth. You know, an order comes in to me in a text. I got to go to the field to make sure it's there. He's got to go check and then he's got to tell me, and then I got to tell and confirm. And by that time, who knows what's happened, it's so much easier to get people, get online and place the order. It automatically goes to our pick and pack lists and it's sorted out and the address is go into our routing software. It's just so much easier. So it's been really cool to watch everybody come back. As a business owner doing this, you know, you have to do quite a bit of handholding. If you've had existing customers that you've had different relationships with. So I've been really careful in navigating my tone and just kinda like trying to help people move along in, in doing this. And It's funny. I had someone on Saturday Farmer's Market, Ferry Plaza in San Francisco come up and said, Yeah, okay. I finally did it cause I was helping him do this and do that and had to talk to accounting and find the accounting and give him a credit card. He made a purchase and then he made the second purchase and when we did second purchase everything was already there. He just had an epiphany, like, oh my God, we're saving time on our end as well, which that's a lot of people don't get that because so many restaurants they're all run differently. And you know, some are real mom pop kind of operations where there's, you know, the chef is the owner and the buyer and the everything right. So they do everything or there's a partnership. So everybody's different and has a different way of doing stuff. So you got to kind of get in there and navigate it and explain it. I've had to write it out. You know, different emails that when people ask me, Hey, can you send me the email list of the prices? And I say, Hey, this is we're going online. Now. This is what we're doing. And I was kind of form letter that gives them a video, shows them how to get on how to sign up, how to place an order, what to expect. And so, you know, that you got to do that kind of stuff, and it's all right. It's okay. There's some people that are just tougher than others that just don't get it. Then you have to weigh how much you want them, you know? And and you know, we don't want to turn anybody away, especially because, you know, we're the ones that kind of changed the way we're doing things. Tricky thing is you email people, you can text them, even talking on the phone. If you talk to people in person, it's just so much different when you can really explain it. And it's just weird because some people just do it. They just, oh, online. Yeah I mean, come on. We all buy things online anyway, we are already doing this. It's just, some restaurants are not used to doing this buying from farms. But when they do, you quickly realize that it's easier, it's either I'm loaning you product/money for 30 days or your credit card is loaning you and just, you might as well use your credit card because everything's tracked properly and we're not going to lose it. The other thing is really looking forward to not having a restaurant go bankrupt this year and owe me money that I never get, because that happens every year. And that's just a bummer, people you know, have problems, you talk to them and you work it out and it's fine. You know, they want to pay it, most of them want to pay. Some people just like move out of town and you're expected to go pick up restaurant equipment at their warehouse or something like that. Cause that's always stressful. Sometimes it's only like a few hundred dollars or sometimes it's couple grand but that'll that'll offset any credit card fees right there.
Rory: 11:30
Yeah. Well, and that's good to hear that some of your customers are kind of realizing the convenience of buying online. Like you said, they're most likely, already buying tons of other things online. It's just a matter of them kind of adjusting to realizing that the restaurant can get their food. It sounds like the wholesale side of the business has been a real area of growth for you and your farm over the past year. Has there been any other kind of areas of growth or success that you guys have experienced in the last year? . Joe: Well, I really our farm box program. We're not really calling it a CSA program at this point. We may transition to more of a traditional CSA model, but we just take advantage of the subscriptions that people want. But we also do single orders, single boxes, farm box salad box. And then when we off anything, that's generic. Like we have canned goods that are easy, you know, canned tomatoes, we have strawberry jam. So we, you know, we put those on the list and those are single people can pick them up or get delivered in Santa Cruz. We're really hanging on to it and we really like it. It really serves us well because it allows us to put stuff in a box that are things that were long in, you know, like every week we have too much of something or we have too little of something to go on the list, you know? And so it's really been nice to be able to kind of ride that out and to, you know, well, we have a lot of cranberry beans this week, so everybody's getting cranberry beans, and I think it partners well with what we're doing. Awesome. And yeah and kind of helps you manage your inventory a little bit better. Being able to throw in a little extra of something you might have. There for customers is always, I think something, they probably even appreciate getting some different kinds of varieties of things in their box. So you kind of started your farming education, I guess in college, correct?
Joe: 13:16
You know, I moved away. I grew up in Santa Cruz. I was a little surf rat, surf jock maybe. I moved to Southern California, San Diego State Business Administration for a year, came back and then I went to UCSC and I created my own major in eco-psychology. So I was doing a lot of environmental studies, a lot of psychology, lots of social psych. And so I did internship at the homeless garden in Santa Cruz, which is a really neat program where it employs homeless people, they have a CSA and it's also a place people can just be, and they had served lunch. And so I hung out there and I was just like, you know, I was thinking, I wanted to see how horticulture helped different people. Like maybe it helps homeless people, maybe in prisons, maybe schoolyards, then you name it right. Then I really just got hooked on the horticulture. You know, I knew I studied a lot of agriculture and I knew that it was important. If you look at our global problems in the world, you know, agriculture always fits right in, food is such a part of our everyday life that it's just, it's huge. So when I, interacted at the homeless garden. I realized that that's really, what I wanted to do is I wanted to farm. So from there I interned on farms for the next few years I intern/work. Sometimes they'd give you a little money, sometimes you wouldn't get any money or you work in the morning for free. You work in the afternoon and the market for some cash, you get food, you get tent space. That's all I needed when I was in my early twenties. That's all I wanted to do. One thing that's interesting in surfing, Gerry Lopez, famous Mr. Pipeline from back in the day, he talks about people being in their first 20, which is 20 years. And I think it's the same with farming. I think it's like it's a minimum of 20 years, before you really start putting it together. I mean, the horticulture is fun, but it's really not until you go through drought cycles, and you go through fires, and you go through whatever terrible landlords and neighbors, and people dying, you know, all of the things that happened to you in life. And you experience that as a farmer, I think that you really gain something that you can't just read in a book. And so, I'm now my second 20, so that's pretty cool.
Rory: 15:24
What would your advice be for farmers that are kind of coming in without growing up on a family farm, for example, that are kind of coming in, like you did looking to kind of start their own farm and get started as a farm business?
Joe: 15:36
Well I always give a kind of a gloomy prediction for people, you know, you just, one thing is if you farm long enough, you probably experience bankruptcy, right? And eventually they'll quit farming. A lot of people that quit that like are middle income they like get hooked on it. Like, this is cool. I want to farm. They do it. They'll do it for awhile. They'll quit. Their marriage marriages will split their girlfriends, boyfriends or partners. They'll split up. It's a lot of stress. It's really hard. so if you're going to do it, long-term, then what I think, like, I wish back in my twenties, I would have spent two more years and gotten, you know, an AA degree in accounting at Cabrillo college, community college. Do you know what I mean, two years? That's nothing, right? Yeah. I mean, I could. I could have done a lot of things like that, you know? So it's any, any time that you can put in before you actually have the credit line in your name right before you have the lease with your name before you're the one that's fully liable, you can't just walk away easily. Put the time in, learn small business, learn accounting, learn the horticulture, which for most people is fun, but get to know other farmers spend time on other people's farms. Because if they're running business, there's something that they're doing that works. Once you start your own farm, you're gonna recreate the wheel over and over and over and over, over again. And it's terrible. And those are costly lessons. Every single time. You know, you can, if you have an endless trust fund and you don't have to worry about finances, then farming could be a lot of just, the good stuff. You can easily pay people, a living wage, which is a real challenge. And you know, that's great, but most people don't have that. So. You know, especially young farmers always say, Hey, go have a career and farm in your forties, you know, get, get your, you know, 401k or your Roth IRA, set up, get your savings plan, get, you know, figure it all out. Get further along the line because if you want to do all that stuff, as a farmer it's much harder because you just don't have as much wiggle room when it comes to finances. You know, the margins you're going to be making as a farmer are going to be very, very slim. So do everything you can before you get there. And then, you know, wouldn't it be nice to retire as a farmer? I know people that have done that, you know, they, they work their whole career. They retire, they buy a house, it's got acreage, they start growing things. They start selling at the farmer's market and it's a great lifestyle. You know, so there's a lot of different ways to do it. I really kind of grounded out in my twenties, thirties, and forties. This is just what I've done. And I've had some moments of looking bankruptcy in the eye and come out the right side of it. You know, I've gotten knock on wood, very lucky, but I also have some huge mentors their phone numbers in my cell phone that I call them whenever I need to. And I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the sobering voice of someone who has had more experience than me, you know?
Rory: 18:50
Well, so we, now, some of this, maybe some of this advice will be, will be similar, or but maybe if you could add a few things, but we just announced the partnership with FFA at our most recent direct conference. So for maybe students that are looking to get into farming at an early age either straight out of college or while they're doing high school or college to kind of start their farm business. So what would be some of your advice to them as they're just starting out?
Joe: 19:14
I think going to UC Davis, Cal Poly, that's around our area the big Ag schools. I think that's huge. You're going to learn so much there. If you know, at an early age that you want to get into agriculture, I think it's, it's huge. And of course there are so many different careers that you can make in Ag. You don't have to be the one that's really hurting out in the field and trying to, you know, make payroll and stuff like that. There's a lot of businesses. There's a lot of nonprofits that need people. That need a lot of skills. So I'd say, yeah, get in a good Ag school and learn accounting. You know, If you learn accounting and ag, that's great. You can always transfer over to another business. Any job is going to be a business. So it's good to have that background and figure out, you know, how the, how the economy works, you know?
Rory: 19:57
So last time you were on the podcast, you had an interesting line I thought, you said the hardest thing for farmers is letting go of what's not working for you. And so I was wondering too, we've been talking about kind of a lot of the farmers just starting out, but for farmers that have been doing this for a while, what would be your advice to them?
Joe: 20:13
Yeah, I, I hear that and I just hear myself. I was obviously talking to myself. You know, that's what I went through is like, especially when you have a business, when you either have a business for a while, or I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of what it's going to be like, right. And once you get into it. You realize like, no, you're not going to grow this. You're not going to sell here, and you need to change and evolve and make sure everything's working out. And so I think a lot of times we get attached to certain things. As the world changes you know, everybody's going online, everybody's paying with a watch or a phone at the farmer's market, you know, not everybody obviously, but that is so normal that we have to make them changes and we have to constantly evolve. And so, it becomes really hard for people I think, to make change that when things aren't serving them, right, you're doing something that is just, you're spending too much money on. It's not efficient, and you look at, well, why are you doing it? You have an emotion, we have a psychological attachment to something, and I just see that happen a lot with people in, in, in trying to shape what kind of farm they're going to grow. And, and then I see people make these amazing breakthroughs when they realize, Hey, I should be growing flowers and selling here only. Cause that's, what's making me money and that's, what's paying, paying the bills, you know? And then you make a shift. You make a radical shift and things become easier, not easier, but you know, less hard.
Rory: 21:40
Your farm, like you mentioned earlier, you guys have always done a pretty good portion of wholesale to retail. Could you maybe talk about how Barn2Door kind of makes that more manageable?
Joe: 21:50
Yeah. you know, we really, we have essentially like a farmer's market customer, retail customer. And we have a restaurant or a wholesale customer. So, it just really, we still do farmer's market and those don't go into Barn2Door at all. That's still, you know, a separate entity, although we do have pickups through Barn2Door at all of our farmer's markets. So, you know, we've just navigated and, and, and use the framework that Barn2Door uses to work specifically to our needs. We've been able to get, you know, our, our farm box program on the retail page, and then we have a newsletter for retail customers, and then we have a separate page and newsletter for our wholesale/restaurant customers. We sell a lot to a local delivery service, Good Eggs here in the bay area. They've been huge and they're, they're supporting a lot of small farms. So they're huge. And a lot of times people will say, well, you know, we tried to deliver as well in the San Francisco bay area. East bay and all that, but it's just too much for it. It's really not what we do. So we're inefficient. So now we partner with them and . There's a couple other businesses that deliver our stuff. So it's kind of easier for us to just, they go through Barn2Door, buy stuff, it goes them and they deliver versus people go, Hey, can you deliver to my, my address? And we just ran them back and say, Hey, here's a link to the store, to the item in the store. Good eggs, four-star or whatever. And so, you know, we've just been navigating what we can do and what we can't do. Sometimes it's better for someone else to do that delivery part. But we have locked into our local delivery here in Santa Cruz county, which we never had before. So that's great because we're really selling a lot more locally. I just want to increase that, you know, as much as I can, selling local. So that's been really cool.
Rory: 23:36
Yeah, I think last time you talked about when you first started offering that local delivery that you thought it would be mostly just your farmer's market customers that wanted the delivery, could you maybe talk about new ways in the last year that you guys have been, trying to make it convenient for customers to get your produce?
Joe: 23:51
I think it's been really eyeopening too, because I opened it up and I started, you know, seeing the names, and getting the emails and stuff, but a lot of new customers came up that had always heard of us and always wanted to get our stuff or maybe did once, but couldn't make it all the time. And so we've found that we have a huge fan base locally of people that weren't able to buy our stuff. So now they're able to do it. You know, I'm just like, oh, why didn't I do this before? You know, I hadn't really thought of it. And so now it's a whole different level of, since people can buy online, any kind of social media posts or any kind of article in the local paper, or, you know, there's national papers, any kind of hit that has a link people go to and they can go to, and they can order something. It's a totally different way of promoting, you know, how we used to do it. We just pretty much did no promoting no promotion, zero. You know, we go to the farmer's market. That's where people are going to be. If we're going to promote, we're going to try and get the market organization to get the farmer's market to be more attractive. So more people come, and then there's my customers, right? So that's always how I approached it. But now we find people online. And of course, with shipping, you know, we can, we have shippable items that we can ship too, so we can send things all over the country right now. We're not doing fresh veg right now, but all canned goods and hats and merch and all this kind of stuff, you know, we can do that. And people are out there that hear and follow us on Instagram that don't live within our area, or don't have, you know, these two days a week that we would have farmer's markets. So it's just, it's really opened it up and it's still, you know, we're still evolving. I don't know where we're going to be in two years from now. Because I'm sure there'll be something new that we're doing that, you know, will improve the way we're doing it and improve our reach and our ability to sell more to people local.
Rory: 25:43
So as a customer and a farm advisor to Barn2Door, could you maybe share a little bit about what your experience in that role has been so far and maybe also how Barn2Door has evolved in terms of product innovation and services and support for farmers, especially in the last year or since you first kind of came on with us.
Joe: 26:01
It's been cool because, you know, like I said, even being on a board, it's kind of flattering say, Hey, do you want to be on our advisory committee on the, wow, me? Thank you. It's been cool because Barn2Door I mean, look, the e-commerce is all new. There's no, e-commerce, that's like generations old, it's all new. And just since I've been on it's been good to get on there and say, Hey, this is the way that we want to use Barn2Door. And this is what our customers are saying. And then feedback is like, Hmm. There's it's instantly in. And there's always updates coming out and there's new apps that are linking, whether it'd be Routific, I know QuickBooks, they started linking with QuickBooks, which is good. Cause it's it's a little part of QuickBooks, but it's a beginning. Figuring all that stuff out, how to do that. I mean, I just can't even imagine. You know, It all seems like it takes a lot of time, but it's really evolving so . Quickly. It's a constantly evolving platform, and I just think that that's part of the Barn2Door is that they're evolving. They're not like, no, this is how we do it. We're not changing. You know? It seems like a very contrary. To that it's very like, let's, let's ride this out and evolve as we go and support as many farms as we can, because, you know, like I said before, one of the big things about this is restaurants aren't used to buying from small farms electronically or online, and it's because of Barn2Door that we're able to, you know, I'm not going to be able to write software to do this, or, you know, I mean, can you imagine? I mean, no way you just can't. I feel like Barn2Door's really forward-thinking and evolving and really just kind of supportive. There's so much tax support for me when I I hit a road block. I can't figure something out and I just go, you know, support and the right there, you know? I still get a weekly meeting, which is so great.
Rory: 27:55
So maybe just as a final question, looking ahead to the next year what are some of your goals?
Joe: 28:00
That's a really good question. I mean, my first goal as small farm is survival. For small farms, I think it's so hard to compete against big farms against wholesale. It's a race to the bottom. And when the price bottoms out and you're stuck with the field full of produce that you barely get paid to pick it. It can be tragic. So we're really like right on that edge with the margins. And I really am trying to tweak the knobs and push as much over into retail. There's a huge potential to do that with online retail sales. I see it and I'm feeling it and I just wanted to, you know, figure out how to do more, you know?
Rory: 28:40
That's great to hear. Just kind of keep trying in every way that you can just to be top of mind with the customers and get them to direct them to your store so they can hopefully make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter or something like that. That's great. I want to extend my thanks to Joe for joining us on this week's podcast episode here. At Barn2Door, we are humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farmers like Joe, who implement sustainable agriculture practices and support their local community. For more information on Dirty Girl Produce visit, DirtyGirlProduce.com or to learn more about Barn2Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm. Go to Barn2Door.com/resources. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.