[goodcompanion]

@Carl Russell 14281 wrote:

Erik, how did you amass your master list? Was that from visits at farmers markets? Or some other manner? I could definitely see us all using this site to some degree, and we have a blog, and there’s facebook etc.., but I hadn’t really thought about that type of membership/outreach process. I can see that working.

I got my master list from farmers markets, and from doing a few tastings elsewhere. We had a bunch of media coverage at one point and I was able to piggyback advertising for the tastings on top of it. That generated a lot of customers.

Once someone is on the list they get the weekly news until they ask to be taken off. I figure there is always a chance that even if their account is sitting empty that they will come around and renew their subscription.

The actual e-mail I send out to the membership is really brief but contains a link to my site’s member page:

http://www.goodcompanionbakery.com/memberpage.html

I try to put a new picture in every week and put the bulk of the news and specials on my website rather than in the e-mail. It takes me about 1/2 hour per week to do the administration for the site and orders.

[goodcompanion]

@Carl Russell 14264 wrote:

Oh, how much do I need to know about flour:p.

This is a reasonably good idea on the surface, but what if I don’t have white oak logs at the mill, or I have lots of hemlock, but not the lengths they are looking for, and the logs are on the deck, or taking up room in the yard? I can’t keep lumber around for ever either waiting to be cut into desirable products.

You could manipulate the ordering program to black out the unavailable items in a given ordering cycle. You could also move stagnant product by making it available to order at a reduced rate. Part of the goal is to encourage clients to buy something they will need eventually, and take it off your hands now.

I send a “reminder email” prior to each ordering cycle to my entire clientele, in which I tell them about our specials. The email also serves to give the membership general news about how my operation is running, maybe even asking for help with certain problems or projects. If it goes out to enough parties you get the response you need. People that are interested enough to “buy in” to your program will probably stay tuned to that stream of news even if they don’t reply or even order for weeks at a time.

@Carl Russell 14264 wrote:

This is the whole inventory problem. Got to have enough to respond, but can’t have too much just sitting around waiting for a customer. If they are on the stump, then I can custom cut to order, but then here comes the time factor, which is not a problem for the right customer, but it narrows the market.
Carl

If your CSF is big enough, orders will probably tend to be pretty uniform over time, with predictable spikes for, perhaps, firewood season and prime building season. Also, if you had a good block of time to custom cut (with your ordering deadline set maybe one week prior to delivery) that might help.

I think this concept would be a cinch to market (says the baker, right?). Go up to your existing customers, or anyone else who might use your product, and ask them how much they spend on forest products in a given year (I spend maybe 2k with all the repairs I am doing). Suggest a starting membership for half that amount. If they don’t use up the credit in their account, you can refund it or roll it into the next year.

The customer would get–

1.The intangibles of promoting your superior practices
2.A slightly reduced rate over retail
3.A connection with an individual who provides a concrete item they need
4.Access to specials when available.
5.A window to material involvement in your operation when appropriate (I often “pay” people for help or favors with bread credits).

[goodcompanion]

@Carl Russell 14258 wrote:

One of the differences with even the model that Erik uses is that our inventory is either still on the stump, or in round wood, but if it is already sawed then we already have a lot invested, and we need even more to respond to the custom order. At least with flour, even though there is a lot of investment in making it, there is a much faster turn-around from flour to the wide variety of marketable items. I am kind of stumped;) on how to turn this model from the sell from inventory model, to the CSF model.

Carl

If you have round wood available to saw, couldn’t you more or less cut what you had available to efficiently meet the orders on your batch list? I could see a batch list that a web-based ordering program would generate looking like this:

hemlock batch list

540 bf 2 x 4, 8′ lengths
410 bf 2 x 4, 12′ lengths
64 bf 2 x 4, 16′ lengths
442 bf 2 x 6 x 12′
144 bf 4 x 6 x 12′
__________________

1600 bf x $.50 = $800

white oak batch list

200 bf 4/4 x 6′-8′
160 bf 4/4 x 10′-12′
320 bf 6/4 x 6′-8′
_________________
680 bf x $2 = $1360

Total hemlock and white oak = $2160

Bear in mind I am pulling numbers out of thin air. If any of you sawmill operators would like to tell me how to organize my bakery operations I am sure I would find that plenty annoying. So my apologies for really knowing rather little about how exactly it works.

Anyway, those two batch orders for two different species might consist of dozens of individual orders, which you wouldn’t need to sort out until the cutting was done and ready for delivery.

[goodcompanion]

I run a CSA pertaining to my bakery. The way I administrate and run it I could see applying to a lot of different areas of farming and forestry.

A typical farm CSA involves a share, for which you get a more-or-less standard offering. Such as, in a given week, one bunch carrots, one head lettuce, one bunch beets, one bag mesclun. This works okay for vegetables in season but less well for lumber.

My CSA is basically run on a simplified tab system. My customers send me a check for an amount of their choosing. Using a web-based account, a variety of goods can then be ordered on a schedule of the customers choosing, and my website deducts the appropriate amount from their account. When the money in a customers account is depleted they can no longer place orders and must send more money.

From my perspective I get a big master batch list out of the program. Then I know that on a given day I need to bake 12 baguettes, 19 batards, 25 multigrain, and so on. Later on in the production day the individual items are labelled for the customer who ordered them (e.g., john smith, one baguette, two multigrain).

For a lumber producer you could talk people into giving you a check for a lump sum to launch the system. For $100 a customer can have, say, 200 bf of softwood lumber cut to your specs deliverable all at once or incrementally on sawing days, perhaps once or twice a week throughout the year.

The sawyer would have the advantage of knowing that so long as the overall order was met it would all be sold the moment it was ready without any left over. If you got 50 people in your community to “buy in” to your wood csa at the $100 level, you would have $5000 advance in funds right out of the gate. You would also be equally able to serve the customer who wanted a little wood for projects here and there as the one who was building a house with this system, seems to me.

I am no genius with things electronic. But for what I was trying to do on the scale I was trying to do it, I kind of lapsed into accidentally creating this program (I had qualified help too) after banging my head against a wall trying to administrate a bakery CSA with variable, flexible ordering with only paper forms. If this really seems appropriate, I can elaborate, or even put anyone in contact with the programmer I worked with.

I really only know the lumber business from the consumer side, so bear that in mind. Maybe my e-model isn’t as transferrable as I think.

[goodcompanion]

@ngcmcn 14246 wrote:

Are you teaching English, or philosophy at Middlebury College? You write well!

Ah..ha ha..thanks for the compliment. I’m not at that pay grade though…I just farm with horses, arbitrate toy disputes between my toddlers, and bake bread.

I’m just overeducated. I come from an academic family and they wouldn’t leave me alone and let me farm until I’d had a good strong dose of what they were having. But that Carl Russell, he can really spin a phrase to rival Wendell Berry or whoever you care to name. What’s his excuse?

@ngcmcn 14246 wrote:

When gas spiked a few years back it almost seemed a blessing…….suddenly local was cheaper and reasonable no matter what it was. Lumber ,food ,milk, bread. Local money stayed close people stopped driving to distance

Neal

If you liked that price spike I think the future has more of the same in store for us. I’m banking on it.

[goodcompanion]

@Carl Russell 14237 wrote:

Realistically though, they are starting where they know they can have some real impact. The discussions we were having at Sanborn Mills Farm this fall were focused primarily on how networking, mentoring, apprenticing, knowledge sharing, labor sharing, and land conservation can all play significant and current roles in strengthening an organization like SFC. These are also some of the most significant foundational components to creating successful future farm communities.

Carl

Carl,

Of course I know you and NEAPFD are on board and I hesitated to even get into this line of discussion. It’s not my wish to undermine anybody’s good ideas or well-intentioned efforts (particularly yours, and this is your board, after all) while there is any hope alive of them working. Particularly with the notion of on-farm education I do think there is a role to fill and potential for resounding success.

But taking a community of interest from the realm of ideas to the realm of action is where the rubber meets the road. I am not sure that the SFJ community is ready for this transition. I am apprehensive about the scope as I understand it.

I guess I understand what SFJ is and what its role is in my life, I understand what DAP is, I understand what NEAPFD is and value them all. Probably when the SFC takes on a definable shape I will be a staunch supporter, but right now I don’t understand what role it proposes to play in my life very well at all. I am also a recovering former Quaker and have a lot of difficulty with group efforts that are idealistic, ambitious and open-ended.

[goodcompanion]

Plowboy,

Believe me, I’d love to be wrong here. I’d like nothing more than small farmers linking arms coast to coast. But that won’t happen until the world changes in such a way that small farmers regain some measure of real importance, as you suggest. If that happens, a lot of the problems currently being discussed will either take care of themselves (are we still going to have a problem with development encroaching on farmland if the megafood production and distribution system starts to break down?) or at least the situation would probably be so altered in such a case as to render the current conversation pretty moot.

[goodcompanion]

@ngcmcn 14230 wrote:

So JH, it seems to me the Small Farm Conservancy is a huge can of worms. It strikes me as part big business.i.e. insurance coverage,retirement, part educational institution.. If i didn’t know better, I’d almost say he was creating a new state, or a new political party ,but then again maybe thats what this country needs. Its an ambitious, huge undertaking which could really make a difference. Can you give me a little of your insight into the SFC plans to implement their goals?
Neal maine

Much as I agree philosophically with pretty much everything Lynn Miller writes, I guess I’m with you in that I don’t really get many aspects of the SFC either.

Neal, you seem to take issue with the scale of the approach. I have to say I’m with you there. For instance when we try to address the issue of say, farm insurance, you kind of have to assume that this is an important permanent problem for small-scale farmers and worth addressing on an institutional scale nationwide. This to me seems like an unwinnable fight, and not worth the agony since the burden of liability insurance on the smallholder is probably a temporary anomaly anyway–a symptom of a hyper-litigious culture in which the main actors are corporations, and likely to go the way of Lehman Bros. within a few decades. Define your farmer-logger insurance scheme in relation to the national insurance system and you are part of that system, whether or not it is flawed nearly to the point of collapse.

Why do we even have to have a national insurance system? Why do we have to have a national retirement system? A health care system? Will we never be able to return for a system in which communities look after their own for such needs? By undertaking a macro-level scheme I think we assume we will not, can not. This seems at odds with the uber-local focus of our farming and forestry efforts as members. It does not play to our strengths.

SFJ readers are a kind of “community” I guess, just like people on this forum are a kind of community, but it is a huge leap of faith for me to see that dispersed community coming to my personal aid materially if my barn burns down. Why should I not look to my nearest neighbors for such aid, and if my neighbors and I can find a way to rely on each other for such help, why would I need a national scheme? Conceptually it is all very, very, abstract to me. It is a tough sell for a community of interest that prides itself on concrete, tangible work of soil, wood, flesh and bone.

The educational component is the easiest to take seriously because it is the one area discussed where we have already found benefit in networking nationally. It is not such a leap for me to imagine development of common standards, accepted rights and obligations for typical farmer/intern contracts, and so on. I would be all for that, it is doable.

Other than that I have to say that I personally don’t have much faith that the SFC effort won’t be a waste of time and energy, and a diversion from our primary objective, building local community and self-reliance. My interpretation is that Miller, on the verge of stepping off the SFJ stage, is thinking about his legacy, and wants to see his powerful command of language precipitate a group action that will quickly take on a life of its own and improve the lot of all his loyal followers. I don’t get it.

Prior to the recent debut of this idea everything else Miller has ever written, near as I can tell, is about how over-reaching, cancerous and grossly over-scaled the nation as a whole is, and how patient toil with hands on lines is the cure, I can agree with that. But now we are invited to believe in the promise of a national macro-level approach that to somehow overcome all these terrible systemic problems Miller has been telling us all along are basically insoluable. I’m confused.

[goodcompanion]

Unfortunately we don’t live in a world where a farmer can drive a wagonload of produce to town, sell it, and leave it at that. But there are upsides.

What you are selling, in addition to your goods, is a story. People are predisposed to love narrative. If you love what you do you will probably enjoy telling your story. If people in your community feel emotionally compelled by what you are doing and how you are doing it, your story becomes part of their story thus helping secure your business for the long term.

The problem (setting aside the notion of falsehood) is balance between time spent telling the story and time spent actually physically creating that story.

As a grain grower myself, I think there is a lot of potential for grains and grain products of all kinds. You may find as I have found that that niche is not very thoroughly filled by farmers around you. But on the other hand your competition, the supermarket, is so very very cheap. And the opportunity to really stand out on quality is not so evident as with, say, tomatoes, or cheese. People are unlikely to say, “My god, that is the best cornmeal I have ever tasted in my life.” So it really comes back, I think, to story.

[goodcompanion]

A single acre is a lot of vegetables. Perhaps one acre in a planting of a wide assortment of stuff and another acre or two of pumpkins or squash would be enough to get your feet wet?

Plowing one acre with a walking plow involves you walking behind the horse for probably ten or twelve miles depending on the width of your share. You could also hire out the plowing and then easily get by maintaining the patch with your single.

For small-scale vegetables, the single is relatively practical. The main tool is the walking cultivator. For seeding you could use a push seeder or rig up a gang of two push seeders that were attached to shafts or something like that. If you do potatoes a hiller would be nice, and though a normal one would be hard to work with a single, maybe a walking plow with a middlebreaker-type share would hill decently? Point being, I guess, that if you can get clear of the really heavy work of plowing you will probably find a single of horse is plenty of power, and the equipment needed a relatively short list.

I agree wholeheartedly with statements above that the marketing is the big challenge. What strategies work for other market gardeners in your area? Are roadside stands common? Strong showing of vegetable vendors at farmers’ markets? CSAs? Is there some kind of farm-chef network? Do you have wholesalers/distributors that you might sell to? I have found that if you grow it they will NOT automatically come, work in the garden itself is half the battle, maybe less. Also remember that if you wholesale to a bunch of stores and/or restaurants that managing the books is also a lot of work.

The fall garden strategy you seem to be hinting at has some appeal–you could grow stuff just for halloween and focus your entire marketing effort for the year on that one thing, make a corn maze and a big event on your farm, hayrides, cider, the works, hire a bunch of help to pull it off, then be done with it. It has worked for others. I don’t love the idea myself because I really want farming to be about feeding people, not throwaway pumpkins, plus I think halloween is all dumbed-down and stupid since they took out the chanting and livestock-sacrifice parts, but I guess you have to choose a strategy that will work for you regardless.

[goodcompanion]

@Carl Russell 14132 wrote:

I have a little piece of philosophy that I try to keep working in my life. It applies to many different aspects of economic, social, and emotional factors. “Opportunities are like Grouse. You can’t shoot until you beat the bushes and flush one out.”

Carl

Is this a Dick Cheney quote?

[goodcompanion]

@Carl Russell 13120 wrote:

I have never paid more than $500 for a leather D-Ring harness. In fact the last two sets I paid $500 and $350 per team set (2 harnesses) and each were in excellent shape and gave me nearly 10 years good hard use. Price is not a convincing argument to me.
Carl

Carl,

Would you mind sharing your source?

[goodcompanion]

henk,

I would be willing to collaborate to make an English translation of that book. I think Promatta is the source of some great ideas and I would like to help make them more widely known.

Erik

[goodcompanion]

I run a bread CSA, year round. About 100 members at any given time. Subscription is quite flexible as all orders are taken weekly through my website. I bake to those orders and deliver them to around 7 drop-off points, which makes for about 6 hours baking and 2.5 hours driving. Works pretty well, and there is almost no waste since everything is prepared to order. If I were baking wholesale I would be doing more probably even more driving and throwing around a third of what I bake to the pigs at my own expense.

My system is IT dependent. I am not an IT guy. But the paper ordering system I used before was too fallible and complicated, and keeping things ultra-simple (e.g., there is one recipe this week and you get it whether you want it or not) seems to have limited the successfulness of other bread CSA models. So with the help of one member I developed my internet-based system. Seems there would be a lot of application for it for all kinds of farm-based products.

[goodcompanion]

I think you must be talking about the curved runner. That must be steam bent from a straight piece or it will have no strength to it. You will probably need to find a boat or chairmaker to make this for you if you aren’t equipped to make sharp steam bends from such thick stock. Sorry for the bad news.

The only way I know of making this kind of piece in an everyday shop is by making your own laminate with weather-resistant glue like titebond 2. You just need a lot of veneer (preferably hardwood) and a lot of glue and a ton of clamps. You could use the iron of the runner as the guide. I can’t say the result would be stronger than a steam-bent piece but it would be about as strong if executed right.

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