Farmer Roundtable: How These First-Generation Farmers Found Success
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we discuss the process of starting a Farm from the ground up with Liz Mason of Honey Bee Hills Farm and Tom Bennett of Bennett Farms. Both first-generation Farmers, Liz, and Tom, share their stories and experiences about how they built their Farms into the successful businesses that they are today.
honeybeehillsfarm.com
bennettfarmsmichigan.com
barn2door.com/resources
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Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for today with members of our Farm Advisor Network: Liz Mason of Honeybee Hills, located in North Carolina, and Tom Bennett of Bennett Farms located in Michigan.
Welcome Liz and Tom. Today we're kind of doing a different style of podcast. We'll be kind of doing a round table discussion, focusing on the topic of starting a Farm from the ground up, which you guys have done. So I'm really excited to jump in and hear your stories and experiences and how you've started without former backgrounds or experiences in farming, and then building them [00:01:00] into the successful businesses that they are today.
So to start out and catch everybody up, could you just share a little bit about what led you to start farming and an update on kind of where you're at today with your Farms and, Liz, if you wanna go first, go for it.
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah, thanks Rory, thanks for having me today. So I run Honeybee Hills Farm. We are a certified organic produce flower and plant Farm in central North Carolina. The beginnings of our Farm were kind of a happy accident. We bought some land and left our previous jobs at the same time for completely different reasons.
And while we were kind of looking around, figuring out what was next, we stumbled across some internet resources and thought, "Hey, we've got a little bit of land. Let's try a growing some produce see what happens." One thing led to another and, we're now up to about 15 cultivated acres.
That first year we were on about a half acre and we've just grown every year since then and right now we're in year five. So you know our story was very much [00:02:00] a DIY story, a figuring it out as you go along kind of a story. And now we're in three Farmer's Markets year round.
We do home delivery to the communities around our Farm, and we also do some wholesale.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. That's pretty fast growth too, for five years. You guys have really expanded a lot, both in terms of land and just all the different ways you're offering your products to people. That's awesome.
Tom, welcome back onto the podcast. How about you? Do you wanna kind of give us an update?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Yeah. So started out farming. I think we bought the land around 2006. Got outta the Marines in 2010. Started farming then more as a hobby Farm, just food for ourselves. And then we started selling bulk coal and half hog orders and it just kept growing from there, started doing some Farmer's Markets and got a taste of that and started doing more.
And today we're serving 20,000 customers a year across 14 Farmer's Markets. And then we have a pretty good online presence with our home delivery, regionally from [00:03:00] Chicago to Grand Rapids, to Fort Wayne. And yeah, so we do pork, chicken and turkey. That's about the extent of it. We did start carrying a couple of items from other local Farms near us that didn't have the the vast customer base that we had.
So like we're carrying milk from an Amish dairy and mushrooms from a mushroom grower down the road from us. But yeah, so started full time farming in 2018 is when I left my Off-farm job to do this full time and it's been good.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Well I think something that I feel like is always kind of the starting point for any Farm or Farmer, and I know is a major challenge today, is just getting that land and land access. And I know not only has the price of land gone up a ton, even since when both of you started farming and it continues to rise, but how did you guys kind of handle that issue?
How do, how are you able to acquire your land to kind of get your foot in the door there, and what would be your advice maybe to Farmers that are wanting to start a Farm and expand their Farm, but are struggling with that land access issue?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Yes, I can jump in on that. So with our land, [00:04:00] what I had done, and it might not necessarily be what I would recommend for starting Farmers. Starting over again, I would do it a little bit differently, but I had bought 20 acres of land while I was still in the Marines. I came home on leave and purchased it.
We did a five year balloon loan payment on it. So relatively good interest rate. But the deal with that is you want to have it paid off by the end of the fifth year before the balloon matures. So, did that, and I worked three jobs while I was in the Marines. So I had the Marines and then I worked construction on the weekends and then every night of the week I delivered pizza.
For three years, I worked about 120 hours a week to pay that off. But what I would do in the future would be, I would look for probably two acres, small amount of land that you can expand from and I would rent as much land as I could near me as opposed to buying it. Buying lands and investment for the next generation, it's not necessarily something that you will immediately benefit from.
It can be [00:05:00] hard to cash flow that especially with land prices in some of the regions of the country. So yeah, I would buy like a couple acres where I could put my main operations hub and center in a nice rural area where I could go to Farms near me, maybe across the street right next to me, and go to the landowner and say, "Hey, what's that row crop Farmer paying for cash rent? I'll double it."
And they'll be more than happy to have an organic Farm on their property, as long as you're paying them just as good as the other guy was or better. You should be able to pick up land that way. And that's probably what I would do, so you didn't have that huge upfront, like quarter million dollar, half million dollar, buy in the beginning.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah Liz, how about you? How have you kind of handled that issue? Or what would be your advice?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: So, for us, we had previous jobs before we came into farming and we actually had other properties. So we sold that property to buy property the land is on. And of course we always joke that we don't own the land the bank does. We make our payments monthly and just kind of go along as we can.
One thing that I'd say for people who are [00:06:00] beginning is, if you're looking at produce, at least here in North Carolina, there's a decent network of incubator Farms where the state or an NGO actually owns the land. They own the equipment. They own the infrastructure. And you can rent space from them to start your Farm and your brand and your business.
And I've seen a number of really strong Farms come out of those types of programs here in North Carolina. And some of those Farms stay in the incubator Farm for years before they go out and purchase or rent their own land.
But it gives you a way to kind of get started again, without that upfront cost. It also gives you a way to get that experience so that when you're going and looking at land, you understand what things you value and what would be helpful for your business so that you can buy a piece of land that is well suited for the type of work that you want to do.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah, that's a great point. And I know here in Washington state, we have a couple programs like that too. And [00:07:00] I think you get like an acre plot of land or maybe a half acre to start. And that is a really great way to kind of learn and figure things out and figure out your priorities.
I think that actually really leads in nicely to my next question for you, which was: for both of you, did you always kind of look and like, Tom, I know you do pork and chicken. Was that like always, you just wanted to do livestock and those animals specifically Liz was it always produce for you that you wanted to do?
How did you kind of decide what products you were gonna offer? Cause I think sometimes farmers get the land from a family member or they're ready to go. But they're like, "oh, what's the best way to go about this." Especially from a business perspective.
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Yeah for me, I've never been that great at growing tomatoes and plants per se. It's not my specialty and I was just more attracted to the animals side of farming, the livestock. Went with pork and chicken because initially, it was the lowest barrier to entry and then had planned on doing beef at some point, but we've been successful enough with the pork and chicken, we don't have any time to expand into other products.
I mean, right now we're selling as [00:08:00] much as we can produce as fast as we can produce it with that. So why try and, reach for something else when we haven't tapped out what's currently working. But yeah, we'll probably always stick with the livestock.
It just kind of suits my personality better in what I like to do. And those veggie guys, man, they work hard like, like, that's a lot of work, harvesting vegetables and stuff. I would assume, I'm not a vegetable person, but Liz is, I'm assuming that most of your equity in your product is tied up in labor for the most part. Like you've got a lot of labor cost as to where with meat and poultry, I mean, we're spending a hundred thousand dollars a year on pig butchering. $90,000 a year on feed bills, I mean, chicken butchering's $40,000 a year.
I mean, we've got huge expenses every week that we've gotta pay. And I think on the veg side, they have a lot of that I'm sure, but it's probably not as crazy as the meat side. So yeah, we got into the meat farming and it's what we like.[00:09:00]
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah. So, you might be able to tell from my farm name, Honeybee Hills Farm, and the fact that I don't sell any honey, that we weren't really sure what we wanted to do when we first got into it. I had been keeping bees for 10 years before we started the Farm and so I thought that was one of the directions we were gonna go into, but then it turned out that beekeeping in the Northern part of the US is very different than in the Southern part of the US.
And there's a lot more challenges down here as far as, Varroa and disease and whatnot that make beekeeping a lot bigger of a job than it was where I was used to. So, we ended up going into produce because that was the type of product that suited the land that we had bought.
We talked with people about expanding into livestock but just given the terrain that we have and we have a lot of little fields split between different places. We looked at a couple different things and that was what we figured out would work best for the land that we had.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. This is kind of going back to the [00:10:00] first question, but I was curious, as you look ahead and maybe do think about growing land and to increase the scale of your guys' businesses, does that kind of seem intimidating to you or does that worry you with how that game is kind of being played right now?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: It probably depends a lot on which part of the country you live in. My perspective might be different than a lot of other people. Like our Farm is surrounded on three sides by a hundred acre tracks of land that are being farmed by Farmers that are in their end stages of life, probably. I mean, unfortunately, one of them's a widow, her husband passed away a long time ago.
I know that'll come up for sale at some point in the next 15, 20 years, most likely. But no, I think I'm done buying land actually. I'm gonna be in the renting game. Cuz I don't need to buy it and pay it off for the next 30 years. I'm 39 right now, it doesn't make sense for me.
I bought my first piece of land when I was 20. This late in the stage of the things I'm just gonna rent and use land as a tool. Obviously we'll contribute to the health of the land and everything else, but it's a tool for me to [00:11:00] have more capacity to produce more high quality animals for our customers. It's not something that I'm trying to stack and pile as like a wealth generator.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. And Liz, you guys still have quite a bit of room to expand, correct?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: No we're fully built out.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Wow. So is that something that you guys have thought about?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Absolutely not. Moving equipment for produce is substantial. And so, just the amount of infrastructure, tools, and resources that we have, yeah, of having to double that up on a different property, holds no appeal to me. We've also kind of maxed out where we wanna be as far as retail sales go.
I'd always like a little bit more we can comfortably manage two Saturday markets ourselves. We did three for a little while, but having to hire staff to do it just did not work out very well for our business model. And so we're kinda where we need to be on the retail side and there are diminishing returns on the whole sales side.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Well, it sounds [00:12:00] like things will be much simpler for both of you. Well, so kind of moving forward with this process of like, okay, you got some land, you decide what products you wanna do. I know a really big question that a lot of our Account Managers and other members that Barn2Door get a lot is: how should I be pricing my products?
And it is kind of a toss up because see what things are being sold for in a grocery store. They're worried about selling their products for too much. But they also know that what they're putting into their products is a lot better and a lot more time consuming than what they people find at the grocery store.
And Tom, I know you've always, definitely erred on the side of like, if somebody's charging the same as me, you're okay with charging more. So could you kind of talk about how you've decided to price your products?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Yeah, I think we wanted to make sure that our margins were good on our inputs first. So we started out that way, looking at like a whole animal unit, like a hog and breaking it down into all the cuts and then valuing each of the cuts to get us to a certain amount above what it cost us to raise and market and sell that animal.
So that way we have a healthy profit margin on [00:13:00] everything that we're doing. So we've never wanted to be the cheapest in any given sector and we're not usually, so, it's just, we can't keep stuff in stock. I mean, that's the thing is like we're doing 300 hogs a year, 5,000 chickens, and I can't process fast enough.
We have, all our processing dates are set, but the thing is like, I could sell 800 pounds of bacon in 14 days. We sold 600 chickens in a week and a half when we got our first batch of chickens. Like that's the issues we're facing, so we can price it, whatever we want and then if we go too far with it, then obviously we'll have stuff in stock a little bit.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah.
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: But we're trying to be fair. When I first got into this, you know, before I knew anything about farming, I was just like: I can do it better. I can do it cheaper. I can compete on cost will be the farm for everyone. it's just not possible. Like once you get into it and start looking at the processing costs and stuff, once you've actually done it for a little bit, you'll quickly realize like you ain't gonna compete with Tyson, so don't try.
Like they can't compete with you on quality, but you're never gonna be able to compete with a box store on [00:14:00] price. I don't go to box stores and look at prices and say, "oh, maybe I'm a little high, a little low." No, it's not the same. It's like comparing a Ford Escort to a Ferrari, like, yeah, they're both cars, but they're completely different.
Like you can't compare those two. So yeah.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah, that's a great example. Also that's a lot of bacon. Liz, how about you on the produce side of things? I know it's definitely a different game for you. How did you kind of decide where your price line should fall for your products?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah., So for us it's kind of a similar approach. Except that, you know, we don't have public tables published by the state or anything to reference to, but we are active in our local Farmer's Markets. And so we do, you know, our market research there and kind of see what the prices are.
We are usually priced kind of towards the top of the market. We're one of two certified organic producers in our area. And so for us that, that adds costs, it adds value for the customer. And I think from a quality perspective, we're certainly at the same level as some of our competitors. And so our prices tend to be towards the top end of what you could [00:15:00] find at the market.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: I was curious, have you guys adjusted price as much? Like I know Tom, you kind of said, when you originally started, you were like, "oh, it'll be the farm for everybody and everything." Have you guys had big changes in how you've decided to price your products, especially maybe with going up in your pricing and in thinking like, "actually what I'm doing is worth a whole lot more than I thought it would be"?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Our very first Farmer's Market, I was charging $3 for a bag of lettuce. And I think my other local farmers let me go two or three weeks before somebody kind of pulled me aside and shook me a little bit and was like, "have you done the math on what it costs you to go pick this lettuce?" And I was like, "well, no."
You know, so, part of it is, as you are developing as a business, understanding what your costs are. In vegetable production, labor's a huge cost. When we made that transition from doing everything ourselves to hiring staff, all of a sudden, it kind of makes you realize what your time is worth if you're not giving yourself an actual paycheck every week and kind of thinking through how you price things.
This year we [00:16:00] also had, like everyone else, we saw our inputs going up drastically. Our fertilizer costs have gone up. Our seed costs went up. Fuel has gone up for our home delivery routes. Labor has gone up.
And so, this year we have increased our prices on some of our products. And in general, the market has supported it. There have been a few things where I think there might just be a mental barrier against crossing certain thresholds in pricing and, there's like one thing I can think of, we end up pulling our pricing back down.
For us, we're just trying to strike a balance between our input costs. And our revenue.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. And I know we've had Paul Grieve on before too, and he'd always talk about like, people typically only really know the what the price should be of a few items. And so they'll kind of base their perception of things around those few. It was like a dozen eggs, a pound of ground beef, and like a whole chicken or something.
And he was like, "if you keep those items, like not ridiculously high, then people will associate your whole store with being reasonably [00:17:00] priced."
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: That's a very intelligent comment. I like that.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: So, kind of moving forward and I think all of you just looking at your Instagrams and things have some sort of like custom packaging and things. And I know getting started that can seem like a small detail, and then you're like, "oh wait, how do we actually figure this out?" And I know it comes up in Connect a lot with you guys as well in the office hours sessions.
How did you go about getting packaging, which sounds like maybe the most boring question ever, but how did you get custom packaging or packaging for your products, especially when you're doing like home delivery, which I think all three of you do?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: So for our private labeling we just found out from our USDA processor who they were using to make their labels and then contacted them. And that worked for one of our butchers we're doing. We have to use two different label companies in two different states for two different butchers that we use, but basically with that the private labeling, there's butcher supply companies probably in your state that you can call and get 'em set up and design a label and [00:18:00] whatnot and then the USDA will just approve that label and sign off on it and then you're all set. And then you just order labels as you need 'em. We usually buy like 20 to 30,000 at a time.
And then on the boxes you should have a box supplier somewhere in your region, like up here, where I'm at, Welch Packaging is who we go to. If you're not sure of where a box supplier would be in your area, flip the box over from your butcher, that you get your meat back in from your butcher in their box and see what's stamped on the bottom.
It'll say something. Call them and they'll make you boxes.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. Liz, how about you?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: So for all of my labels, I design them in Word and then I print them with my printer. And that works for us for things like labels for lettuce bags and different things like that. Same kind of approach as far as the boxes go. We've got a main company here in North Carolina.
There's one in North Carolina, there's one in Virginia that, they'll either ship them to me or I can drive down and pick 'em up. So I think that a regional distributor for those boxes seems to be pretty common. And then for some [00:19:00] of our like plastic packaging I kind of went around the market and looked at other people's packaging and just asked them where they got it. So there's one specific bag that I really like for our lettuce mixes. And there's a company in Wisconsin who has those bags. And so, another farm and I, a couple times a year, we put an order together and do a big order and have it shipped down so we can split the shipping costs.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: That's awesome. That's cool. I like partnering up with another team too, to up the volume a little bit and probably get a better price. Do you guys do anything for when you're doing deliveries to make sure that you have like an insulated packaging or putting dry ice in a box or anything like that?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: We don't insulate or dry ice on our home deliveries. It's explained to our customer several times in their checkout process. Like if they do not plan on being home between the delivery timeframe or they're gonna be at work, or maybe if they have to step out, they need to leave a cooler on their porch.
So we just drop the orders in the cooler when we get there. And we send a text message that their orders arrived when we drop an order.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: I feel like it would be [00:20:00] inevitable that somebody, at some point wouldn't leave out a cooler. Do you guys not drop the order then and just give it to 'em later or do you just leave it?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: I drop it and I text them and I call 'em and leave 'em a message just saying, "Hey, this order's on your step." I know they didn't forget it. I mean, they got an email the day before to remind coming. So it's, they probably just went to go pick up some milk or get their kid from school.
Like, in all the years we've been doing it, i've never had a customer call me and say, you know, upset because like they forgot in their orders. Well, when I leave a $75 order on a doorstep and there's no cooler and I call 'em multiple times and no one answers, I still leave it because it's worth me having the possibility of having to refund a $75 order, is a better possibility than having to re-deliver that thing tomorrow. Cause I ain't going back out there again for two more weeks, you know, to that region.
And if it's a $75 order, my cost is $35, what's it gonna cost me to redeliver it? I got too many orders to get out. It's never, we've never been bit by it. No one's ever had an issue. Nothing's ever went bad, everybody's always gotten it in time. So I guess until it becomes [00:21:00] an issue, we'll just keep doing it that way.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. Great. Another really big problem facing a lot of protein producers when they're getting started is that processing. Tom, I know you mentioned earlier, like you're booking processing dates before you even have the animals.
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Last week. Yeah, last week I just booked 300 kill dates for hogs for all of 2023. Like I'm booked. I'm the reason you can't get a processing date in your state because guys like me go in and we book hundreds and hundreds of animals a year in advance. As soon as my butcher gets their new book from Office Max and starts putting dates in, I'm the first guy going in there because I've already been asking for a month when she's gonna get her 2023 book.
So yeah, we've already got our dates locked down for all of next year on everything except poultry. We haven't started the poultry yet.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: So if you were new to farming right now what are like some things you wish you would've known before kind of going into that process or that environment of having to figure out your processing dates?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: All processors are created equal. Find out who's doing it the best in your area and look at the packaging, look at the USDA number on that package. There's gonna be a [00:22:00] USDA stamp, but the USDA number on it. Do a cross reference to that number and find out what packer that's coming from and use them because you can waste a lot of years screwing around with mediocre butchers.
It's just it's better if you can just figure out who's best upfront and start using them from the beginning. And yeah, your dates are gonna be you're limiting factor for growth. And you also, don't be the guy that books a whole bunch of dates. You know why my butcher will let me book 300 dates for 2023 and be like, okay, no problem?
Because I've never canceled. I've always brought exactly what I said I would bring every time. So if you start booking dates and then being like, "oh, I'm supposed to bring in 20 hogs, but now only got eight" or this and that, like that you're gonna ruin your relationship and they won't have that trust with you to let you do that in the future.
So, it's pretty important that you hold up to your end of the bargain because that's their revenue too. Like they booked all these hogs for you to get killed. If you don't kill 'em they got a whole staff, they still need to pay that was there that day, so they're trying to scramble to fill it.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. So, [00:23:00] okay, Liz, we'll transition back to some non protein specifics. So, starting out, was it important to you to have like a clear brand and was having those clear brand values, something that was kind of conscious and really important in your messaging early on?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah. So, I mean, I think for us our brand is just basically the way that we do business from a kind of approach perspective. So, the most important thing for us is actually food safety. It sometimes still shocks me that like I can grow food and people will trust us to eat it.
So food safety is huge for us. Quality organic practices, the things like that. So from a practices perspective, I feel like we're pretty transparent about the things that we value and how we try to run our business from kind of the marketing side of branding.
I talk about those things a little bit, but the thing that we try to really push on the marketing side is just letting people have a little bit of insight into what it takes to grow food. And so, our online presence is, kind of, really about just kinda sharing the journey and showing people what it takes to actually grow those tomatoes and the fact [00:24:00] that when storms happen, things fall down. Or when it doesn't rain for a month, the pond starts to go dry and we have to triage what gets watered and what doesn't. And so from a kind of marketing perspective, that's where we sit. And also we made the decision very early on to go ahead and get certified organic. There's a lot of small farms that don't go through the certification process for lots of different reasons.
And I think they're all legitimate reasons. It is an expensive process. It is very time consuming. But for us as a new farm, in an area of the state that has a lot of producers already, it was a way for us to brand ourselves and be very clear with consumers about what we were selling.
And so for us, it was very important from a signaling perspective and getting new customers and getting into markets perspective is the main reason that we decided to go ahead and do our certification.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah, definitely that's a strong differentiator, especially cuz that, the term organic means so much to consumers. So that's a great way to go about that.
Tom, how about you? How did you kind of go about [00:25:00] marketing and branding when you were first starting out?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: I mean when we're first start now I kind of knew more of what I didn't want us to be than what I wanted us to be. I guess that was easier to define. Quality, of course we let our customers do a lot of our brand building for us as well. You know, we have huge fan base.
So we don't walk around telling people how awesome we are; take our word for it. Like we let our customers do that for us. We built a pretty cool brand. I mean, it's fun, quality, transparency. We have an open door policy on our Farm. So we don't spend all day telling people how we raise our animals.
Like they know they can read our website, they can see that and if they want to come out, they can come out and see it. So we had like about 60 families come out month before last, I think into our farm. Ton of good pictures. We were able to use a lot of that on social media to kind of promote like the farm tour.
I want our brand to be fun and hip and like relevant, like in today's environment. You know, like a lot of the chefs in restaurants, they do a pretty cool job, like promoting their brand. And I kind of started to emulate that somewhat. So locally, [00:26:00] everybody knows who we are within the region.
I was in target two weeks ago. And the guy checking me out was like, "are you that guy from Bennett Farms? I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Who are you?" He's like, "oh, I follow you online. I'm like, well, that's pretty cool." Like I felt like, "man, like I made it but..."
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Celebrity Farmer!
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: My wife, she was at an office somewhere taking care of some business and a lady was like, "are you related to Bennett Farms?" And she was like, "yeah, I'm his wife." And she was blown away like, "oh my God." So our social media stuff works, cuz I mean, strangers recognize us. But our quality of our food just speaks for itself. Like I don't have to ask you to buy my broths. Like buy 'em or don't buy 'em.
But if you buy 'em, you're gonna buy 'em every week, cuz they're that good. Like, we just got some chicken broths in last week that's gonna be nuts, cuz they're way better than the pork broths. But it's just our brand happened without planning, I guess it just kind of, we fell into what we are.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Tom, you're a local celebrity man.
Well sometimes farming is one of unique industries, I guess, where like starting [00:27:00] a business can be so focused around your passion for something. And I guess that's true of a lot of people, but it feels especially personal with farming and how people are choosing to raise their products. But like to stop and look at it from like the business and financial perspective, what are some of the things that people might not think of that they should have planned out before they jump into this? And maybe Liz to start with you?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah, so I think with farming, understanding what your financial goals are for yourself or your family is really important going into it. I think a lot of us can put our hearts and souls and all of our energy into something without really paying attention to what we're being paid to do it. And that works at the beginning for a lot of people.
But if you're not clear about where you need to be as a family and what your revenue needs to be, it can get pretty tricky pretty quickly. And so whether that means, somebody has an off Farm [00:28:00] job, which a lot of people do when they're starting out, or if that means putting more labor into to it yourself versus hiring other people to do things. Understanding your financials is super important, you know, as a Farm, I think we were at the beginning a little too focused on revenue and not paying attention to profit.
Especially in produce where your yields can be wildly different from season to season and year to year, it's really hard to do projections. We were also a business that, you know, we essentially came up through the pandemic. And so, the sales curves went way out the window, just thrown away when the pandemic hit.
And at least in our region, there was an interest in local foods and an interest in Farmer's Markets. And so, making sure that you understand not just your revenue, but also kind of the profit side of that equation and understand how much time you're putting into it and how much you are getting paid.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. Tom, how about you for like, [00:29:00] kind of the early things that people might not think about when starting a Farm business?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Yeah, you're gonna have mornings when you wake up with anxiety, when you start a Farm. I mean, there are real financial issues that you will face, and that's what's gonna weed you out from someone who decides to keep going and someone who just quits and goes back to their day job.
But once you get some things figured out, it does get easier, you know, after the third year or you get a few years into it, a lot of your costs are gonna be one time things for the most part. So you won't always have those going into the future, but one of the biggest things that has helped me go from being a Farm that was constantly worried about the financial situations to being one that where like, life was good, like this works.
I mean, obviously you're gonna make a lot of mistakes in the beginning. You're gonna overspend on certain things that you don't need. But I found a book, it's called Profits First by Mike Michalowicz. You know, It's kind of one of those cheesy marketing book, but there is a lot of good golden business [00:30:00] nuggets in there for creating a Farm that will actually pay you an income.
The book's based on helping any business, but it's an entrepreneurial book and at the end of that book, it'll change everything for you. I know for us, it did. So it's gonna be hard in the beginning, but if you can survive long enough and stick with it, it gets better.
And that's why we scale as much as we have. I mean, we do 14 Farmer's Markets a week, just because like, you make X amount of margin off each market. I need 14 markets.
I would do 28 markets if I could. I mean, one of the reasons I love farming. Okay. First of all, so like there's a passion in it for me there, but also one of the things that kind of had me fed up with my day job previous to farming was like, I capped out like my growth potential. Like I was there. Like I just, I don't like having a ceiling placed over me. Like I want my growth potential to be unlimited. So even if I don't take full advantage of it, at least I know that, no one's holding me [00:31:00] back as far as that goes.
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: One other thing too, when you're thinking about what you're gonna Farm is really kind of thinking through where you're gonna be able to sell it. I did not realize going in as an outsider, how competitive a lot of Farmer's Markets are to get into. At least in our area, you know, there are Farmer's Markets that haven't taken new Farms in for years and years, and those are some of the more desirable markets to be in.
So especially if you're going into something that a lot of other people are doing, kind of figuring out how, how you're gonna get into those markets or what your alternative is. Can you sell from your Farm? Can you do home delivery? Can you build out a CSA program, you know, I think is important.
Alternatively trying to figure out like, is there a niche that's not currently being filled in your community and kind of targeting your products towards that.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah, no, that's a great point, cuz I know that is a huge challenge for a lot of Farms that are, they're just starting up and they either can't get into a market or I've also heard from other Farms that's like, oh, there's a market nearby, but it's [00:32:00] like, There's no other Farmers there. It's a Farmer's Market, but it's like, they're just selling crafts and different things like that.
And so nobody's going there for food. And so that can be a problem too. So definitely like, kind of doing that research before.
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: And on the Farmer's Market, she's exactly right. Like some of the best markets take years to get into, like we spent three years trying to get into one market, and we finally got in and it's amazing. And now that we're in, we're like, "thank God they don't let everybody in", because they would be inundated with so many Farms that no one would make any money. Because customers like to spread their spending out across multiple Farms.
So if you're one of three meat vendors at a market, you're gonna get a substantial amount. But if you're one of five, like there's ladies who will try and buy one item from each of the five, ten Farms. Then that means everybody goes broke. So some of our local markets that aren't that great, I mean, we'll do 800 to a thousand there in six hours, but then we go into Chicago and we'll do $3,000 in six hours. It's a huge difference.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah, [00:33:00] no, definitely. Well, when does you guys feel like it was the right time to transition online and when did that become an important decision for you, as well as like offering your products through a web store and ordering that way? When did that seem like it would be something you wanted?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: So we went online in response to the pandemic. If you had asked me the year prior, would I be accepting online orders and would I be running a home delivery business? The answer would've been absolutely not. But for us, two of our, at the time five Farmer's Markets, closed down and the produce was already in the ground. Everything was planted.
And so I went through a number of different systems to try to organize orders from people. My first one was like a Google spreadsheet where people could just go into the spreadsheet itself and type in what they wanted. I tried a couple different platforms that worked okay, but they were not great.
And then we settled on Barn2Door because of the convenience of the ways that we work with our customers. And so now, we do all of our [00:34:00] home delivery through the online store. And then we also offer pickup at the Farmer's Markets through the online store.
We also manage our CSA exclusively through Barn2Door and it just kind of gives me a place where, you know, all the information's in one place. I can manage my data better that way.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. Tom, how about you?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Yeah, I knew that we needed and I wanted to be online since before Barn2Door was even offering the service they offer. Like I knew from the beginning and I was just thinking, you know, there's 7 million people in my region, like in my immediate region.
If I could just sell the one in a thousand of them, one out of every thousand, I'll set like that. How do I get in front of that many people though? Cause if I could individually pitch what I'm selling to a thousand people, way more than one will buy. It became a numbers thing at some point and the only way to get in front of that many people was to be online.
It had been on the back burner for maybe a year and a half. I didn't realize the software and the technology existed yet. I started thinking about this and I think I [00:35:00] started with you guys in 2018, but I thought I was gonna have to hire like a web developer to build an online store for me.
And then you guys reached out to me and I'm like, "what, okay." And your team was just like, "here, send us your product list, tell us this, like, we're gonna do it all for you initially. Like the setup." I'm like, well, okay, sold. Like, let's do it. And then you know, every week or two weeks we would have meetings and you would just kind of prod me a little bit to like, are you trying this? Are you trying this?
And that was good, cause it kept me on track and focused because sometimes I'm just too worried about actual Farm operations and it grew and, I mean, our Farm wouldn't exist without being online. Let's put it that way. I mean, it wouldn't be, I don't think sustainable, especially in the winter. During the winter, our online sales are what make us a year round Farm and get us through back to those summer markets, so...
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. What would maybe be some advice you would give to a Farmer who is newer to farming? Maybe they're just starting to do some products either just right off the Farm or to friends and family. What [00:36:00] would be your advice to that person if they're looking at transitioning online, but haven't made that jump yet?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Farmer's Markets help. I mean, cuz you can hand out your flyers and promote your online store at the markets. That helps. Google, you need a Google business page. I like constantly am preaching that to people and some people don't even know what a Google business listing is, but you need a Google business listing.
Cuz a lot of your traffic to your online store is gonna come from cell phone searches. And you're only gonna get out of it what you put into it, if you think that if you're gonna just gonna flip a switch and turn on your online store and sit back and like, "oh, are we ready? I don't know if we're gonna be able to pack all these orders. They're gonna come in so fast."
Like nothing's gonna happen if you don't tell people it exists, you know what I mean? Like you guys provide the software and the technical know how and marketing expertise, but it's on the Farm to actually do the marketing. So, you've gotta go out there and self promote what you're doing to people, yeah.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. Liz. How about you?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: So for us, having a weekly newsletter has really helped our online sales. And so, I [00:37:00] send out a newsletter every Monday and that generates almost all of our online store sales for the week. People still kind of trickle in at their own pace. That's kind of the reminder. Go place your order. See what's new. Get onto the store.
I think especially with produce our products are changing all the time. We have a built in opportunity for marketing to give people updates on, "oh, this week we've got zucchini. Oh, this week we've got watermelons." And to kind of keep it fresh and encourage people to place an order as possible.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. And Tom you use the order reminders a lot too. And I know that you've had a similar experience to Liz in that.
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: So I do the MailChimp newsletters and that's a big cash generator. We do those about once a month, but then sometimes if I just want to get something simple out to the customers, without going through the whole newsletter experience, I can just do an order reminder and send it out to all customers that have ever purchased through our online store that are in our email system.
And it'll just be like a one sentence, like, "Hey, we got this in stock today or bacon's finally back", and that'll generate a substantial amount of orders as [00:38:00] well and it's super easy. I mean, I can do it in four minutes, not much to it.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. Cool. Final two questions for you guys. You also both started doing delivery as well. So what went into that decision and why did it seem like something you could take on? Cause I know that delivery seems like a lot to a lot of Farms.
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah, so delivery was our pivot for our business. Initially it was really just to get volumes of stuff moving since some of our markets has closed down. But when they opened back up, we realized that from a staffing perspective, it was easier for us to hire a delivery driver than to hire help at the Farmer's Markets.
And so, for us delivery took the place of one of our Saturday markets for our revenue stream. And so it was just an easier way for us to reach customers than Saturday markets.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome. And Tom, how about you? When did you decide to take on delivery and why?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: Delivery just makes sense for us from a time perspective. Like I can go out and deliver $2,000 worth [00:39:00] of product in three hours. I could send two staff people to two different farmers markets and they could sit there for 6- 12 man hours to move $2,000 worth of product.
Like it just, you can move so much more product, you know, cuz it consolidates those orders from a week or two weeks until, you know, one moment that they're all being delivered and you can just move all that. You've got a lot less time and labor in it. And you're picking up customers that will never step foot in a Farmer's Market when you're doing home delivery.
So it can be a completely different customer base.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. Awesome. Well, to wrap things up what would be your final advice you would want someone to know starting a new Farm . What would be that one, maybe key to success?
Tom Bennett - Bennett Farms: You gotta be willing to push through like the hard days. Like if you're the type of person that'll fold when things get tough, like just keep working your day job. I mean, you might like the idea of farming. Like, it sounds fun, but it takes strong-willed people to stick with this. It's not just running a business. You're the manufacturer. You're the salesperson. You're the distribution channel. You're doing everything. It's hard, [00:40:00] so you gotta really want it.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Awesome, yeah. Liz?
Liz Mason - Honeybee Hills Farm: Yeah, I think just to build on that, I think farming, especially coming in new to farming, kind of keeping an eye on everything that's going on around you and checking in with everybody, building a good team around you, whether that's your own family members or whether that's your staff, and just having an eye towards how can we make this better and how can we make sure that we're gonna be here to last and be able to accomplish our goals.
Rory Loughran - Barn2Door: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much.
I want to extend my thanks to Liz and Tom for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn2Door we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country in including farmers like Liz and Tom who implement sustainable agricultural practices and support their local communities.
We're honored to get the opportunity to learn from our most successful Farmers who share the tactics, resources, and tools they use to grow and manage their farm businesses. If you would like to connect with these Farmers and any other Farm Advisors, attend Barn2Door Connect. You can [00:41:00] register for weekly sessions barn2door.com/connect.
For more information on Honeybee Hills Farm and Bennett Farms, you can follow them on Instagram and Facebook. See Honeybee Hills Farm and @bennettfarmsmichigian.
Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.