| Women in Agriculture |
Tape #247 - Link Between Agriculture, Production and Marketing
areas between federal, state,
local tribal government and the profit and non-profit sectors so within our
state counsels and we have one in New York.
I’m sure we would be welcoming to have your co-operative to be a member
but now let’s tell your name again that what you all, what your figure, your
best effort is to do your marketing. My
name is Kaye Zieski (sp), I’m from northern New York. I’m treasurer of a small co-op that sells milk to Kraft to make
cream cheese, and we negotiate in the past with Kraft to try to get a good
price and it’s very hard because they are very large and they are very talented
and we’re dairy farmers. But now, Dairy
Lee, which is a larger co-op, came in and stole our market and now we have to
go through Dairy Lee to Kraft and so far we are ok because we negotiated a
pretty good contract but another year they might say, well you have to join and
then we’ll have to find another market because if we join them, it costs very
much and the way we’re doing, we doing pretty well as an affiliate they call
us, so we’re doing doing pretty well like that but we are always looking for
another market because you have to have one in your hip pocket in case you
can’t negotiate. So how are you going
about developing those other markets?
What are you doing to actually develop those other markets? Well, I would say we discuss it all the
time. You know someone has an idea of
what we could do but as far as to actually do it, we haven’t done it yet
because so far, this market is good and it’s the best market there is around
us. So, now what we’re doing is trying
to go work with some other co-ops which are small like us because the
farmers in our area are dropping out
and we’re losing a lot of farms and the people are getting older and they can’t
sell because of tax problems and so we’re trying to bring other people into our
co-op to keep enough milk there to pay our staff that writes the checks and
does the milk testing and all that kind of thing. And so as long as we can keep the amount up, we’ll be all right
but we have to work all the time at it.
I’d like to ask, does someone have a question? I’m just getting use to the butter market. Oh, definite. [Background talking -- not clear as to what was said]. That’s absolutely right. The butter fat market is up and we’re trying
to import is so that’s a pretty good suggestion. I’d like to ask somebody who is on the marketing side what would
you recommend to Kay and her co-operative as ways to help improve the marketing
of their dairy products of their raw milk that they’re selling for cream cheese
and maybe they should be selling it for butter fat, well that’s what they make
it out of is the butter fat. Ok. Anybody whose on the marketing side? What advice would you offer? Where are you? Anybody? Somebody who is
on the marketing side? In New Zealand, I’m Hillary ____ from New Zealand. I’m a director of our local dairy co-op and
our dairy co-op has 7,000 shareholders so we’re a large dairy co-op and in fact
we’re the largest in New Zealand and 90% of our product is exported. And therefore, we’re very, very vulnerable
given that we export 90%. Therefore, to
try and reduce the risk and to reduce this vulnerability, what we do is we
actually own the marketing arm so all of the dairy co-ops in New Zealand are in
the marketing arm which is a singular seller of our product and that’s the New
Zealand dairy Board., and therefore the dairy board is in charge of developing
the brands and trying to develop the marketing into different countries on our
behalf. Therefore, we have complete
control right throughout the value chain, right from the farming at grass roots
level, to the manufacturing right through to the marketing and to me there is a
real way to reduce your risk and increase your reward so if I was in your
situation, I would attempt as a group of small co-ops to get _______ to
cooperate and that’s what women are all about and that’s what we’re good at,
we’re good at cooperating, get in there and get a marketing arm going and try
and find something specific, something niche, so that you can maybe develop
your own brand, make something specific about it, so that you are away from the
multi-nationals, so that you are not
just a supplier of product to somebody who can then say no we don’t want
it, so that’s what I would recommend.
That sounds great. Does New York
have a certified product identity program that helps __ so that if your co-op
and several others got together and developed a finished product, an evalue
(???) added product and you could have a certified product identity for it, it
would make it sell better, would that be something that might help to diversify
what you are doing? Maybe. I thing right now our problem here is that
we never know what our price of milk is going to be. And one month it’s here and the next month it’s here and the next
month it’s here. Well, the exporters tell me and it would be the
same for us that I make a deal that I will sell this product and in 2 months
the price that I’m getting is way below the price of the milk so then they say
forget that and then they don’t get it out of the country. So far, we’re importing a lot more than
we’re exporting. I called Washington
last week and we are importing a whole lot more but, we’re even importing
butter, I want you to know, but anyway, it makes it very hard to do this unless
you do have a finished product like you mentioned, if we could find a niche
that would be a very good deal. Thank
you. So there’s a good suggestion. Yes,
where I come from Massachusetts, we’ve started a new dairy co-op called
Our Family Farms of Western Massachusetts and some of our marketing techniques
are we actually go into a grocery store, set up a table and have them
taste our milk. And we have a premium milk that we still
belong to Agrimark our co-op. We have
six co-op members belonging to Agrimark.
So we do sell our milk to Agrimark but we buy it back and it’s
segregated. One truck picks up six
farms. We’ve added a member and we have
another one that is waiting at the door to come in and I’m the treasurer of our family farm’s milk co-op. We do our own marketing and a lot of times
the farmers are going into the stores, checking the shelves making sure they
are stocked, talking to the store managers and we do pay them for doing that
service and that’s one way they get paid from the local co-op to go in and
sell. We’ve had a lot of free publicity
on radio and newspapers and we’re very optimistic in case the market of milk
we’re in in the New England Dairy Compact.
Also, we do get paid a price for our milk and its’s not up and
down. We have a set price we get
paid. But this is above and beyond,
we’re guaranteeing our future and hopefully, we can add farms in our valley to
this co-op. People are buying it because
they want to support local farmers and they want premium milk and that is what
they’re getting and I really believe in Agriculture and supporting farms as
best I can. [Something said in
background] Sure you can. Do you bottle your own milk or does Agrimark
do it for you? No, Agrimark does not do
-- they’re just a milk broker, Right,
we have one truck that picks us all up, takes it directly to a processing
plant, and it’s all segregated, its
processed there, we’re actually buying the milk back from the processing plant
because we are so young, we started in September, that we had no credit, we
have no investment, except for our hard work, and our marketing, that we buy
our milk back from the processing plant and sell it to the ..... the stores buy
it from us. But, eventually, we hope maybe
to have a processing plant. We’ve looked
into money to help us build a processing plant. We also have a local ice cream dairy that does a lot of our
administration and we pay them to do the billing, to do the sales, sending out
the truck routes, and we don’t have a truck, we subcontract that also. But we’re just starting and we’re really
looking forward to building this local business in western Massachusetts. That’s fantastic. Okay. Yes. We’ll come back here and then we’ll get
you. Okay? I just couldn’t help but to say something. I owned a dairy up until last year and I had
to sell my dairy. I guess we milked
about 450 cows every day -- that was just in the milking line. We were doing fine until Opal, the hurricane
came up through Alabama and did so much damage to our state and it did a lot of
damage to our dairy and especially our cows.
Our cows did not regain production.
We did not have electricity for five days and those of you who know
anything about dairy you know if you don’t milk cows in five days, you are
going to have _____ and have it bad.
All right, we got out of the dairy business. We now are in poultry and I’ve put a lot of my land in CRP, some
of you know what I’m talking about there.
What I wanted to say when I heard you speak. Now I’m still active on some dairy committees, they wanted me to
stay on them and when I heard you say the New England Plan, now our -- we have
a farm group, _____ Farmer’s Federation, and they have been working towards
trying to get the same thing you’ve got.
A compact. That’s what I wanted
to say mainly was let you know that what I understand in my state is that’s a
good plan and I’m going to try to find out more about it. I’ve even learned a little more just from
your speaking. And then I’ll know
whether I want to push it, and help or say no, no, let’s don’t do that. Pardon.
That’s just what I had to say.
I’m Jean Petrie from Petrie Alabama.
Jean Petrie from Alabama, is that right? Yes, I work for Farm Service Agency. Now I think that PA and MD both have just enacted those same
laws. Yes. My name is Bobbi Scott from New South Wales, Australia. I’m a wool grower and a wool manufacturer
value adder exporter and retailer. So I
thought maybe I’m right off a bit your perspective from my experience in terms
of marketing, value adding production because I work the whole chain, what I
would say, in our environment the wool industry in Australia when I started 5
years ago in terms of value adding, $11.68kg to $2.68 kg with the bank knocking
at your door, a very good incentive to get out and do something, but one of the
things I’ve found is I work in a very disjointed industry -- the industry is
the wool industry and they can’t organize themselves out of a paper bag. And so, I have chosen to work on alternative
markets. And I think what we’re all
about and in all of our work is alternative marketing. We’re all about co-operating marketing. And I think its important maybe to give you some ideas of some of the things that
we’ve done. We decided that we would
produce value added products because we could take a value from our product,
_____ the ____ for the dairy ladies opportunity from $2.68 kg to $70. $30 cost still a long way in front of
$2.68kg. We also decided that we had
to listen to our market. We had to get
out there and do our own consumer research and not rely on other’s to do
it. So we obtained one full day expo
trade fair local agriculture show community organization. Anything we could every 6 days _____ across
Australia to give people the chance to talk to us as the managing directors of
our company, and give us first-hand information, and I think if we’re going to
develop, then that’s something that we really must get is that face-to-face
marketing information and then develop the product to suit the need. Our market research shows that we needed to
get away from willie jumpers and winter image of wool, so we developed fine,
superfine wool so that you all are seeing and saying where did you get
that? Am I right? Also, too, the thing that I would say is
that in our industries, we must market at every opportunity. We must know our produce inside out. We must know the organizations, the trade
support that can work there for us, and use them. Thank you. You’re
fabulous. Everybody knows what a niche
market is? It means it’s just a small
market for a specialized product and so we’re not trying to sell wool to
everybody in the whole world. You’re
trying to sell it to people who are going to make those very fine fabrics or to
other products, other uses of wool, not
just for clothing, carpets and other types of activity as well. Is that right? My name is Pam _____ and I’m a dairy farmer from Wisconsin. Maybe you who are still in the spirit of
womanhood can answer my question. The
lady that was the treasurer for the premium milk, can you just tell what kind
of premium, moneywise, you expect. I
know with the compact and all it might be different and I might have a hard
time relating but ..... Right now, what
we do is just pay people for marketing efforts. I get paid to be a treasurer, we do have a president which is a
woman, we do have clerk, which is a woman, but there are men and women involved
in this co-op and they get paid to do marketing. They get paid to go into the store, right now it’s a new co-op,
it’s only been in existence since September.
We are going to be paying people to come to meetings. We have meetings every other week right now
because of planting and haying and things we can’t squeeze it in any more than
that. So we get paid to go to meetings,
we don’t know what’s going to happen with the dairy compact once it expires so
this is some kind of security we have and we are marketing our product, direct
marketing. We’re not going to get rich
on it right now -- maybe some day.
We’re looking into insurance and have that buying power too. [Question asked away from microphone -- not
clear as to what was said] We have
talked about that but its ... yeah, now that’s serious. They’ve thrown out a lot of numbers. But it just ...... We haven’t really seriously talked about that. Do you get paid on a flat basis for each
visit you make? Is that how you do
it? Yes. We charge about $20 dollars -- the co-op member can make $20 to
stop in a store to talk with dairy managers or the store manager, make sure the
shelves are full, make sure the cartons are clean cause we do subcontract out
for delivery services too so we have to watch delivery trucks and make sure
they handle our milk right, make sure it’s cold at all times, and it’s quality
assurance that you’re doing, that’s correct, and it does cost more in
supermarkets, it may cost 20 - 30 cents more per gallon and maybe 10 or 20
cents more a half gallon but I find that we have higher milk prices in
Massachusetts than we do in some of the other states that I’ve checked out
also. So are you gonna plan to market
in the sense of either a local flyer or a local radio, or a newspaper or use
any of that kind of advertising? We do
piggyback with some of the stores and use some of their radio time, and we do
call up when they have talk shows and they talk about local produce and local
marketing. We do call up the radio
stations, one of us will and put a plug
in for our family farms. That’s
smart. Ok. That sounds great.
Anybody else want to offer a suggestion on marketing? Yes, in the back of the room. You may have to come forward a little
bit. My name is Anne Bossi (sp) and my
husband and I run a diversified farm in Maine and I also work for Heather
project in the national in the northeast with small scale farmers like us. Before my husband and I got together, he was
a large _____ Maine scale hog farmer.
And he went the government route and put in all the big necessary barns
and manure pits and went broke and lost the farm. Since then, since 1990, we started, we went to Joel ______ farm
in Virginia and learned how to, saw how he did -- pastured poultry. We started doing that and nearly killed each
other because our pastures aren’t like golf courses like his and and also we
needed year-round income so we changed things around and we now raise our
chickens in green houses so we can raise them year round. But since that time when people came to our
farm to buy chickens we had them butchered and sold them direct from the farm
on his model. People would come down to
the farm and look around and see what we had and say, Oh, you have a
garden? Do you sell stuff from the
garden? Oh, you have sheep? Do you
sell lamb? Oh, you have this and it was
frightening. They wanted
everything. And for years, I raised a
lot of sheep -- I had 250, well for me it was a lot, 200 in Maine is a lot --
200 ewes and I lost my shirt for years, you know selling lambs to the auction
barn at a loss. I never even tried to
sell out of my garden because I figured everybody’s got a garden and there are
also market gardeners around so there is no way I can compete. Well, I can compete. People came down, they get use to our
chickens, and then they get you know they like chickens and they want more from
us. We’ve gone through a lot of farm enterprises, we are now _____, we’re
making a profit, we’re not rich but
we’re happy and we are paying our bills and just in a little bit beyond that
we’ve tried a lot of different enterprises, we continue with the poultry
because that’s such an excellent market.
Everybody eats a chicken a week at least. We sell ours for $2.00/lb.
We sell our hogs as sausage mostly and its cut, _____, we market at farmer’s market and to
restaurants and health food stores.
[Question asked in background -- not clear] We do not because I work for,
I have a job, I do not, we have purposely kept my, I have not put hardly
anything into the farm because my husband wanted to know if he could do it on
his own coming from bankruptcy and he could and did. But, so we have our chickens butchered. He’s .... [Question in background -- not clear] Yes, it would be more profitable if we did
our own. but it’s also more
complicated because, unless you can do
the work yourselves,our kids are grown and not interested in butchering
chickens oddly enough when they get to be teenagers. So we have it done and it would be more profitable if we did our
own, I’m sure. Now does your marketing
mainly word of mouth or do you do some organized marketing -- either
advertising in the paper or on the Internet or ...... We didn’t have much money to do advertising. So we have been, tried to be creative about
advertising and when we started first started with our chickens we got booth
space at a local fair in return for taking some animals there as a petting zoo,
you know a little petting farm so they didn’t charge us for the booth and we
had flyers we put out and signs up about our chickens and we had pre-order
forms and that’s how we started. We’re
done very little newspaper advertising because it hasn’t worked for us very
well. However, we do open house, we
have an open house in the Spring. We
also have a seedling. I raise seedlings
and sell them. We have an open house,
in fact we have several a year and we get free advertising for that because we
can put posters up around the community saying we’re having an open house and
its a community service. But it’s also
good for us because people come and they learn about what we’re doing and we
can get coverage from the press about that because they are always looking for
stories of things that are going on. We
raise turkeys and we let the TV stations know and they come and take pictures
before Thanksgiving because they really need turkey pictures. [Question in background] Is there a specific time of year? We do it right around Memorial Day just
before planting season. It’s really for
the seedlings and we open the entire farm.
I do signs for everything. It’s
an educational event. I put signs up
everywhere -- just my hand-lettered signs
as neat as I can do. Notes explaining
what a pig is and what it produces, and how old this pig is, that pig is
because we have different sows with litters and so on. People can pat the animals, and so on, so
that’s one. And then we’ve added one we
do in the middle of the summer. We’re
in the tourist area, so we do what we call a gourmet open house. And we invite other producers to come, set
up at our farm, and sell mostly their value added stuff so that people can come
and eat, have samples, buy things, buy the food, and then we do something at
Thanksgiving also. We set up a farmer’s
market in our green house, so people cme pick up their turkeys, can buy their
whole Thanksgiving dinner right there.
Not necessarily from us because we don’t do it all -- but from other
farmers. [Question in background] Yeah, no, only fro the Thanksgiving one
_______ the gourmet open house. [Question
not clear] Do you ever go to the
schools and get the schools, to bring to have a school trip to see the farm
animals. Yeah, we’re open. We don’t even have to let them know anymore
and they know where to come for farm tours and they know they’re welcome to
call. We’ve even had people -- just
tourists who were bored. We could, I
suppose, charge. We’ve had some of the
______ that we sell meat to offer to
put up our little brochures and say that we do farm tours if we want and they
can come and I suppose we could charge them.
But I don’t really want to. One
of the farms in the area that I live in in southern Maryland use to do
hayrides, and they use to charge for the hayrides around Halloween and they use
to also have pumpkin picking -- not contests, but opportunities for school
children, and they charge like .50 cents a kid or something, whatever. I want to know if she has any specialized
insurance if anyone gets hurt on h er farm?
You have liability insurance. Yes, we do through farm family and product
insurance. That’s part of what I was
going to ask. The risk that you are
running and slaughtering your chickens and selling them I don’t believe that we
could bet by with that in our state, we have state inspectors and they are
quite strict also, you know what the
waste management is. I just don’t see
how you’re getting by with it.
[Background comment] She doesn’t
do it herself. They have someone else
do it. But who are they? They’ve got a butcher. Is it a licensed shop? How do you go about getting your chickens
_______. Our chickens are butchered at
a licensed, a state licensed slaughter house for poultry. Actually, some of the people slaughtering
their own chickens and our butcher for a while was composting (sp) the end
______ and stuff. That Joel _______ in
Virginia does -- he does it right behind his house. And it doesn’t smell,
It’s unbelievable. He layers the
guts and feathers and everything with woodchips and its doesn’t ... I mean they
live there. It doesn’t smell at
all. I’ve been there. It’s quite amazing. Its rots right down. He does not use it on the garden. He puts it
on pastures. Obviously, how much of
that would make a difference too. Does
anybody else want to talk about their efforts to market a different
product? Yes, I’m a gourd farmer. I use to raise the gourds for bird houses
and one day I looked at a gourd and I saw a snow man in it. So I began to paint snow men on the
gourd. That was when I didn’t know
other people liked them. And the more I
was doing the gourds I found out the artists really liked the gourds to do
artwork on and its a different medium.
So I had this artist stop by the house one day. They say my sign out front. We use to do farmer’s market and we’d sell
our products right out of our yard.
We’d raise watermelons, ____ melons, and that type of stuff. And this couple saw the signs and they
stopped and they bought some of our gourds.
Well, eventually, it wasn’t very long, maybe within 2-3 years, they were
buying like $2,500 worth of gourds at a
time. But now, I advertise. I’ve joined the American Gourd Society
that’s based out of Ohio. I joined ___
Indiana Gourd Society in Indiana. I’m a member of the Kentucky Gourd Society,
and there are several other states I intend to join. I just now joined -- there’s a group in Canada. I have .... are forming _____ group I think
they have a magazine that comes out.
You can advertise through those.
And the American Gourd Society is more, it’s a national type thing, a
world-wide and so that goes all over the world and then I got on the
Internet. And all you have to do, you
know whatever you’re interested in, you just type it in. [Question in background] Does it help? Oh, yes. I got in
chatroom with a group called Gourd Patch and people who either farm or just
love gourds are, or maybe even gardening, but I’m after the artist. I want to hook the artist. [Question in background] So you found your niche with not just
farming but in who your customer is, you were able to double, triple, expand
your business? I’m up to 28 acres now
compared to maybe like a little garden in the beginning. Right now, my next ..... Of course, I have a room set aside in my
house. I call it my gourd museum. And if I have people who come who don’t know
a whole lot about the art, like somebody like myself, I might see hundreds of
artists and see the different unique work they might do on the gourd and then
somebody else comes to my house and gets some gourds and maybe they haven’t
seen hardly any. Well, I collect other
people’s work and I’ll take them into my house and say this is what you can do
with them. [Question] Do you have any photographs? Yes, I have a lot of photographs here. [Question in background] Right.
And people who do the artwork, especially those who buy from me, they’ll
send me photographs and or even give me a piece of theirs. And we trade a lot and I make money by just
trading because that gourd is something that belongs to my collection. I’m getting ready now to do a gourd festival
at my house or at my farm, but I’ll have to check into the insurance and that side
of it. But I’m going to try to use some
of my neighbors. We have one neighbor
who raises watermelons, ___ melons, pumpkins.
We have another neighbor who _______ houses, we have another neighbor
who has all kinds of peacocks, and stuff like that. I think people would really like it. But the Internet probably was my biggest step. And I have a personal home page now and
people who type in the word “gourds”, they can find me just like this. And you have a little place on there you
know to click on to get your e-mail.
And they can e-mail you real quick.
I like those. I like it better
when you advertise in magazines and people send and want your price lists which
I charge them for my price lists because I think too many people like
comparison shopping and that way they don’t get my price list unless they’re
really interested. [Question in
background] Oh, probably about 15 or
20. They cross but I carry my ... a lot
of stuff around with me. And I will be on a panel tomorrow and I’m
gonna use that notebook. My husband
will have to leave it with me but you just show people gourds and they go ____
especially if they’re artists. Are
there any artists in here? That
great. Yes.
Bobbi Scott again. Can I make a
comment please on formal marketing as well because we’re hearing some of the
wonderful informal marketing that the bigger we grow, the more people are
involved, the more we need to get our message out. ____ One of the things that I’ve discovered in the marketing
structure is that you need to say your message at least 13 times before the
person remembers you. 13 times. So the first time they flick over, the next
time they flick over a bit more of it, and so it goes on. It’s that reinforcement of the message. So your message needs to be unique. Your message needs to be clear and
targeted. I’ve found in my experience
that when I was working by doing blanket advertising that was fine to start
with but it was very, very expensive and I was not looking at and evaluating
the cost of my marketing. By setting yu
your listing where everywhere you go, you get a person’s name, address, and
phone number -- there are networkers -- you get that name, address, and phone
number and ____ follow it through and follow it through. In our situation, we have taken an industry
that was going to take my farm into a worldwide marketing industry in 5 years,
employ 35 people in a town of 3,000. We
are targeting everything we do from the newspaper ad. If we do a newspaper ad, we make sure there is a coupon or
response. If we get a response, we make
sure we have a deadline for follow-up.
If we do a blanket advertising, we make sure we offer a reward for
responding. When you’re looking at that
sort of advertising, you save your dollar.
Also, too, the word comes up co-operative many times. And we tend to put co-operative as
like-minded together but you can piggyback on your competitors to your advantage. You can, as some of the ladies are saying,
you can find out what your neighbors are good at, and use them to share the
advertising bill and use them to expand your customer base. Very simple techniques but also very
effective ones that can work for us as a team.
What I’ve tried to do in my marketing structure is look at the way I
work as a woman, the way I work as a team member rather than the way
traditionally we work in competitive situations. We can’t have the same skills and so what we’ve tried to do is to
tap into the skills of others and to use those people to develop our
product. Thank you. You mentioned the word team and I’d like to
key on that. A book I read recently is
called “Team Nets” and it talks about when people manufacture things and really
when you’re in agriculture, you are in a sense, manufacturing something, the
value you add to it makes it like a manufacturing and just as you have, you may
have chickens and you may get to a point where you have a customer who wants twice as many as you can provide, or
twice as many gourds or a particular wool product, what is the opportunity of
knowing who your competitors are in the same field but where you could come
together as a virtual organization to handle a particular order, or a
particular customer. So, in other words,
yu can only produce a hundred chickens and your neighbor can produce a hundred,
and some poultry company or restaurant or caterer or whoever it is, wants to
buy 200 and they want 200 for the next month but then they don’t want them
anymore. Can you come together and work
for that temporary opportunity and can you market yourself in such a way that
the caterers, the restaurants, the whoever, how that if they have this order,
that they can come to you within a very short time, in 5 days, in 2 days,
whatever, you can put together the net that would allow you to fill that big
order yet, it doesn’t require you to take on all the expense of becoming a huge
company. Anybody have any thoughts on
that? Anyone use them? Sorry about this. I had a request in Australia for 100 ______ T-shirts ______ T-shirts
from Nike a week. Now that’s what ....
in Australia, we don’t have that sort of bulk order. That would have made me out of business. I would have been broke. So you have several options. You can use the factory you’ve got, or you
can say how many other clothing manufacturers across the state can I work with,
how many other clothing factories across Australia can I work with, or you can
look at another opportunity and say what would happen if, instead of selling
the T-shirts, I sold the fabric. And so
we have just signed a contract to sell our first container load of our wool
fabric into America. So you can turn
the options around if you can’t find the co-operative way of getting your
product out. Maybe look at another
opportunity from that request. We’ve
done that on a much, much, much smaller scale.
We had our local large supermarket chain ask for 400 turkeys, ask for
400 hundred turkeys which we didn’t have extra, they asked us in late/early
Fall which is not when you start raising turkeys for the November market. So we were able to get together with a
competitor and pool together enough turkeys to fill that order so we both benefited from that. But we also market co-operatively. Our butcher also raises chickens the way we
do and so we pull together orders when we need to like that so. But then again, I think it’s important to
know when to say no. It’s very
difficult. We’ve raised all kinds of things. You know as soon as 3 people say they want
something my husband says, oh yeah, we can
raise that and so we’ve raised rabbits, and ducks and heirloom breed turkeys
and should we stop the sheep -- although now that we’ve stopped them because we
have such name recognition -- I’m sure we could raise dozens of lambs. So now we’re milking goats and making
cheese. But it’s important to know when
to say no. [Comments from young lady
from India very sketchy because I was
not able to clearly understand what was said]
When it comes to the _____________ the marketing and pulling in
together, we have different, different groups.
We have a village which is very small so they produce something. So then we have to represent ourselves
_____________ or something in the cities so then it becomes very
difficult. So we have formed a network
wherein all the women will collectively take up all the produce from different,
different villages. They all come
collectively and at the center, from each village, one leader would come. Of course, it’s on rotation. If today, that village _______ come, the 2nd
lady from that village _______ come for the next fair. They all come together, they all bring their
views, and they put it in the central __________, and we usually have a village
fair, or a tribal fair, we have a very unique name given to it. So that the city people get attracted to the
tribal names and ______ a very traditional manner because some ___________ they
really get attracted to it and they really make a very good marketing _______. The name itself attracts, you know. So once they come there we put a very
traditional way. We go into the
traditional manner combined with the _________needed which is the guidance
given through the ________. We all give
the guidance that is needed for the ______ that is how we do that thing. But when it comes to the marketing the real
topic of _______ between agriculture production and marketing. Again, I take you back to our village
example where we have done it. Our
village women, they produce the ______, the ____ from the trees they take out and
the whole week they beat up and ______ it and __________ they stay in the
mountains so there is no _______ no transportation, once in a week ________ all
the tribals come __________, so when the middle man comes in, he picks up the
products with a hand, and he says it a few kilos and the woman and the whole
family, mainly the women are involved, they do the beating, otherwise the whole produce will go to
waste. So therefore, when they do all that, the middle man comes and picks it
up and he says it is a few _____ and it
maybe double the money. We had a
training program and the women they
just came together and just when we
said that the ______ needs to be
increased in this market for example, the production of that village was the
___ that they produced is exported almost to all different, different countries
for making the carpets, for making the _____
and some of them for
_____________ and it goes to different, different countries. But from that very village around $10,000
worth of good is taken from that very tribal village but though our efforts, we
have placed nothing but weighing machine.
In the weighing machine, we said that this is what you have to do and
after the weighing only, you please give them.
So volunteers stood, we give the people who bought a ______ so that they
can weigh. But In the first week, I’m
telling you some of the problems ________ because _______. First week, the landlord said middle man who
came to take the produce, they said we will not buy from you. You do not believe us. You believe these people who have come now
and talk to you. So we will not take
it. So these people, this is the only
means of living for them. So they cannot carry ____ back to the mountains. So they say, okay, we’ll sell it after
them. So only a few people left with us
who are the leaders, they left with us and others, they have given it up. The second week again, the whole week, we
talked to them. Day and night we were
with them and we were telling them if you cannot do it, they cannot earn the
money because when we went to the place where they were actually selling, they
were selling for almost $50 - $60 --
_____ $50,000 or $60,000, almost five times as much as what they were taking
from the tribals money. So we said your
produce is very important. So the
second week, they had their own machine and they said you see, you see, and
that illustrate they cannot see the number so they thought it was weighing
machine ______ something was being weighed -- so they sold it off. But today the situation is entirely
different and now we have almost 350 persons increase in the value what they
had bought and this has given a great impact in the village itself and the
whole market economy has changed. And
today, they know and apart from that now they are so much ____ they want the
youth. In the last class I was telling
them the youth got into the services.
They said that we will not migrate ourselves after getting the education
to the cities but we will stay back in the village and instead, of the middle
man coming and buying the produce and giving it to the industry, we will do it
ourselves. So all the youth got
together. They are _____ a co-operative
and they are taking the produce. They
are selling it. But we have to get the
trucks ________. We have applied to our
government for the banks and all, for the loan. But it’s in the process.
That’s the experience that I wanted to share. So we find that education and marketing really go hand .....
, they are the same thing, they go
hand-in-hand. We have to both educate
our producers as well as our customers, right?
Okay. Our women is that what you
are saying? I’m sorry, I’m a little hard of hearing. So if I don’t get it right, just tell me again. Who else would like to talk about their efforts
at marketing or their efforts to make a link
between themselves as the
producer and a marketer who will
understand their product and help them to increase their sales? I’m Ruby from Alaska and anybody else from
Alaska? Hello anyway. My husband
and I were both born and raised in Alaska. I’m part _____ Eskimo, my grandmother was a reindeer herder. So I’ve always had a love of animals. But, reindeer herding is different right now. It’s transitioning from federal
government to private enterprise for
the native people. It’s a very
difficult transitioning for an indigenous people to become capitalists when
they’re social community by nature you know.
So that’s kinda of a different
thing for me to experience and then I married my husband who -- I got pictures here -- I married my
husband and we started farming. He’s done dairy farming, he use to sell
machinery down in the _____ Valley which was around Palmer, about 40 miles from
Anchorage and 20 years ago they started what was called a recipient of the pipe
line and its called the Agricultural project.
You’ve probably heard of it where they invested some of their money
and started a farming project . Well, there was 60,000 acres on the
first -- it’s all forest and you had to
clear it. And so we cleared our section which was 900 and some acres and
we started our oat, wheat, barley and then grass seed business that he was in
at the time was a grass seed and certified grain seed adapted only for Alaska
start at a lower soil temperature. And
so we cleared the land and got that started but then we had trouble with bison
coming in because we do have a wild herd of buffalo which is about 500. So ten years of that and we’ve raised _____
cattle which were a thing for a
while. Now they’re not. My point is diversification. Now we raise some angus cattle, we’re down
to 20 head versus 250 because the marketing in Alaska is very, very difficult
because you have to take a product from
finish to end. You can’t rely on anybody else because it’s a boom and bust state. Somebody might start a business such as a
slaughter house. In 5 or 6 years they
might shut it down. You lose a whole
agricultural industry which has happened to us too. Six hundred hogs went down and 500 cattle around there and that
kinda thing. So its a very, very
difficult. We need Seattle price plus
shipping which we aren’t going to get.
We’re lucky if we get Iowa price.
So anyway. So then we decide
what to do and everyone was upset about the bison. And we thought what a good way you know -- looks like a game
_____ Get our own bison because they do
_____ there because they do charge people to come hunt the bison. They get
permits and they can take a hundred
head a year out of the mother herd .
But for us we thought we’ll turn it around and now _____ is the hub of the bison industry for Alaska. We have a hundred head now. And we’ve got elk and wild boar hogs we just in fact, I was .... I went through the Anchorage Airport to
get here. And I picked up a _____ paper,
an Anchorage paper, a known paper which
is where my godmother is from. And in
order to advertise, cause we are going to start doing our first bison hunts, our own, and they are about 3,000 apiece for
someone to come. We are going to start
advertising European International
because Alaska is a hop, skip and jump for the European places there. You can’t do enough PR -- public relations. We also had people stop by all the time. We’re six miles off the road
and gosh we got ___ because
everyone thinks in Alaska that your
backyard is their tourist area. And so
we do Princess Tours. We do about 3,000 people a year come through ____ and we do --
it’s about a hundred dollars a bus its not much but it gives us the public
relations again you know and what we’ve done also is merged with a neighbor who
has cabins, he sells cabins, and we do a thing where they stay at his place and
then they come and hunt. I just wanted
to let you know some of the different ideas we’ve done too. Very good.
Hello, I’m Annie Wilson from _____ Kansas and just wanted to mention
that we have ... I’m going to give a workshop Wednesday afternoon and talk some
about sustainable production that’s what the name of the workshop is. But actually, I wanted to talk a lot about
marketing but we raise free range beef
and this is beef that is grown entirely on grass, never can find on
feed lot and this is something that I
think we can really marry the sustainability of certain production methods with
a product because the result of grass-finishing beef is that it is incredibly much more leaner and healthier than
fattened beef which I think is also a
good product and there will also be a market for that and we very much
don’t want to hurt our co-cattle
producers but this is a wonderful alternative and you were mentioning earlier
about when you have a large order and how the two ____ to pool supplies, once
again, I think you just can’t beat a
co-operative because if you’re going to niche market you’ve got to have
such quality control and such a definition of your product that ____ take in a stranger without them having gone
through the entire quality control and production model that you have developed
for your product would be very hard and that’s why you can pool supply in a
co-operative. In a co-operative when
there’s a weather extreme for one producer, maybe someone in a different
location they haven’t had that draught or that problem so there’s really a
lot of advantage to marketing co-operatively.
Also, I’d just like to say -- one thing we have learned so much . We knew nothing and are still are just babes in the woods and I know in marketing
after four years but what I would encourage people to do is to learn the food
system. Learn about distributors and
ways to get your product from remote
areas like where we live to the market that you need because we just can’t
direct market because we are so
far from cities , but we’ve now learned about natural foods distributor that
exists in all sorts of -- you know there’s just hundreds of them
and we have three -- well we have three distributors now, Blooming Pairie which
is the northern Midwest, Hudson Valley which is in the east coast and Ozark crop of network which is in the south
from Texas to Florida. They have
catalogue and talk about targeted advertising.
You put an add in this catalogue and it’s exactly who the people are that want to buy your product . I mean it’s all set up. It’s just there for you. But you have to get your product developed
to the point where the distributor will take you and we try to nickel and dime
things. We made our own brochures and
we thought they were pretty good and they were okay. But the way we got into these big distributors we finally went
to a professional graphic artist . We
had some really nice materials that I’d like to show you but costs us a fortune
-- we’re still paying for it. But boom,
we got into Blooming Pair with 26 states now.
So, I think it’s a hard lesson
to me that you have to do that.
I wish you didn’t. Mom and Pop
is the model that I would like but it doesn’t always work. And you do sometimes have to shell out the
money to get that image which makes people take you seriously. That’s great. This is such a popular one that I’ve been outside for 30 minutes
waiting to just get to the door. And as
I listened, you know one of the things that strikes me is that so many American
farms you know are larger and that sort
of thing but what you said a little bit
ago really struck me as something I think that at a woman’s conference we ought
to be talking about . That’s human
rights. I want to tell you that across
the southeast United States the way that production is done, and this is a very
typical thing, is we are in Arkansas, we’re the home of Awl-Mart. And I know all of you have heard of
Awl-Mart. Typically, a large company
goes into a southern town and they say as she said with Nike, we want to buy
200,000 white shirts from you and we are a tax situation as such that cities
and states give money so they may give them free utilities rates and this sort
of thing so that they can go around and do that. A local factory owner pays himself a salary first, then he hires women at minimum wage across the
south to make Lee jeans or whatever, you know that sort of thing with
______. And I think I would encourage
you and all of you women that are in a nations where they are just starting out
that you hold strong and we in developed
nations would hold strong for human
rights so that we do not have tennis shoes made for two cents and selling for
$200 and that short of thing. So that
in the fixture we will have trade and you can compete. I want you to compete on a fair market with
all of us but it’s not going to work unless we all hang together for human rights. Thank you ‘I’m glad that was raised and I agree with you. One of the comments, one of the things that
we did in our country town of 3,000
people was decide that we would keep our manufacturer west of the mountain out of the
city. That we would train up our
workers and we’ve trained all of our workers have gone through national
accredited training. All of our workers
too. We decided that we would pay them the going rate of
$12.43 an hour, not .50 cents a month..
And that is according to industry standards. We also grade -- our workers were trained through a grading
system, a four-year training and also we decided that we wanted our schools
_____ to be portable, worldwide and Australia-wide and I will not, I have great problems about selling my
fabric worldwide because I have problems about controlling the morality of companies that work on .50 cents a month
or an hour. I think your point is valid
and very important. Anyone else have
a comment on that? I’d like to go back
to the topic of team nets versus
CO-operative. And it’s really not
versus because there are appropriate times where you need CO-operatives
but there may be times when you really do need to be able to know your
competitors and to figure out ways to benefit all of you on a temporary
basis or an occasional basis and that’s the thing I think you want to think
about. Who wrote the book? You would ask me that. I don’t know it off the top of my head but I tell you what, I will try to get to my
office tonight and I will put it on the bulletin board. I will bring the cover and just stick there where you can see
it. But I think it’s a very interesting
book because it talks about -- and this
is internationally -- it talks doubt companies finding -- it talks about the
Italians, in particular, where they
have had small craft guilds. This is
not Agriculture but they are talking about small craft guilds where they do
pottery, where they do dishes, where
they do glass, where to do a lot of things that requires skills and in order to
keep the quality high, they have small shops but they can CO-operate together
when they get a huge order. But there
are other examples as well. And I’m
sure that a model can be used by a lot of different ______. But I will try to bring the cover in
tomorrow and put it on the bulletin board.
There’s this fellow in Michigan --
he raises gourds. And he gets an
order for 100,000 ornamental gourds every year and he started talking around to
people who raised gourds to help him when his didn’t come up to par so this was my first year to sell gourds to
him, to sell to somebody else down in
North Carolina to help him so I
planted this year. I planted with him in mind. He gets the really big orders. Huge orders. He knows how to get out there and get those. He’s a good friend of mine you know as far
as teaching me new ways. A lot of the
type of help I get because I live out
in a pretty remote area so a lot of the kids there around there want to do
the work -- they don’t like to work. So
he’s taught me how to get the right machinery to get rid of that kind of help
.We probably could talk all day on that.
I’m sorry. But anyhow that’s
what I’ve done. I can afford to do it
with this type of machinery to raise and
this year I’m hoping to get several hundred thousand of little biddy
gourds. And hoping that he keeps
getting big orders. Seven hundred
thousand is a lot of gourds. Hi, I
just have a question. Can people talk a
little bit more about the use of web pages and if you’re using a web page, do
they actually buy it over the web page?
And what about the security issues and all that kind of stuff? And what are people’s experiences using web
pages? When I got on the gourd patch,
other people they put links when they write in on their post , they’ll write
their link usually with theirs when they sign their signature they’ll have
their link and you click onto it and it takes you right into their home
page. What you keep writing into the
chatroom where people are actually
interested, because they really are your target group. If you get your name out there long enough
and then like mine, like on mine, .just through the chatroom, I got a lot of
orders because I would sign mine Sand
Lady’s Gourd Farm. That means
that all of a sudden, I’m a source because a lot of people .... it’s
unheard to know where in the world can
you find gourds. So they see that and they’ll start talking backing
and forth to one another and one person
might say “Well I ordered this box of
gourds from somebody and when I got them,
I opened them up and they all fell apart -- the quality was no good.
Well, I make sure that when I send gourds, especially by freight that
they are the best quality that I can go out there and find because they’ll get
on this chatroom group on the Internet and they’ll start talking about how good
the gourds were. Well, when they do
that, all of a sudden, I get 2 or 3 more orders. Do they send you a check , do you do it by Visa [rest of
question not clear]? I do it by
check. I have not done it by Visa
because I’ve heard some people say you lose money. Some day I might do it that
way. They will call me or e-mail me and
give me an order . And most of the time
-- most people I think are very trustworthy.
I’ve only got just probably under 5 bad customers in all the years. So, they’ll send me this message and I’ll
say why don’t we just let the box and the check cross through the mail. _________
Most of the time I always get it.
I’ve got this personal home page up now. We just now replaced it with a new one, anyone can go in there
right and type in the word gourds and then look for the word sand lady and
you’ll find my home page. You won’t
find many visitors on this one because it’s a brand new one. But it’s very personable. An d it takes you out into the country where
I live. Yes, it has pictures of our
farm , has pictures of the field , and then after you see the field you’ll
actually ... I have pictures of my home page but they are in black and white
back here. I ran out of color. ___ get to see a gourd grown down there or
up here on a trellis. You’ll see things
you maybe never knew about a gourd, how it grows. Right it do. I tell them
when to pick them. I’ve got a lot more
to add to it. One of the nice things
about a home page is like I’m a grower , I’m hoping to link up people to my
sight that are artists you know and somebody will say “Well, I’d like to see
other people who do the art cause they like to gain ideas and etc. from other
people, they’ll learn that way. And
then I have this friend who we make really a nice friendship over Internet
. She was the first one who wanted this
home page for me cause it helped her.
That’s one thing about the
Internet, you help me and I’ll help you.
She wanted ... uh, she did art and she needed suppliers..
Okay. So she wanted to link my sight to hers and she actually put a
really nice page on hers for me and I would get mail, compliments through the
mail on my sight even if they just were lookers. So she developed your home page for you? [Rest of question not clear] Well, she’s training me now. I just now bought front page and she lives
in the state of Washington and she can put my home page in clear across the
country which is about 1,500 miles to my house to ______ and I have to give her
my password. She zeroes right into my
home page area and she installs it. And
she is in the process of teaching me now how to edit. To take off and add to it.
And she’s says to change it often.
Sure. Keep changing it. That’s your business [rest of comment in
background not discernible].
Right. Yes. Yeah, I’d say probably ... uh so far I’ve not been on it since just like last October. It’s probably about 50 percent. One of the things I did by going clear
across the country where they can actually see a lot more than what I use to --
use to it would just __ advertising in magazines and get a price list. Now they see the pictures and so forth. But most people don’t want to pay freight, that’s what stops them
, they’ll think well I can get a lot of gourds but it costs me so much for the
freight. Well people like me know
freight is high and I try not to make anything off that freight except what it
costs me to send the box out there, and
the box itself and the tape and I tape them good. So what I did I measured
a box . I got a certain size I like to ship them in and I try to get them to
buy this one large box full of gourds.
Little orders are just -- they’re time consumers. Takes almost as much time to put a small box
together. So I offer them this big box
on the Internet for $75. I’ll say I’ll
put as many gourds as you want .... as I can get in it but you tell me what kind of gourd you
like. Like what are you making with
it. This is what really boosted my
sales. I said tell me do you want to
make a bowl out of it . Do you want to
make a basket out of it? Or do you just
want to paint a Santa Claus on it? Tell
me what it is you do with it. And when
I fill the box up, being an artist
myself, I keep that in mind. I go out
there and look at my gourds through their eyes. And to this day, I’ve
not had one person say “You led me wrong.”
So the Internet does really help.
But you have to know how to use it.
You have to spend time talking to people on it. [Some comments not
clearly understood] Because if you
spend all your time on the Internet, you won’t have time for producing. Does anybody else use the Internet? Does
anyone else have a home page? No one
else has a home page? Our daughter is
in high school and she’s working on a
home page because I’m not much for I’m
not real good on computers yet. But we
want to market our pork over the home page over the Internet. So that’s going to be our next _______. We don’t market, we don’t ship our beef
because it’s so expensive ____ it has to be frozen and it exceeds the cost of
the product the shipping is so high but I do think the Internet can be a
wonderful way to just give your consumers information about your products
because especially natural foods people they want to know everything it. They want to know who raised it . They want to know the nutritional content. We also give recipes and cooking
instructions so we have about a 5-part home page that gives detailed
information and then we have also newsletter articles that we update
periodically because a lot of natural foods stores and co-ops want .. they have
newsletters and they are always looking for copy. So you can get net real easy off the home page. Does anybody else have anything they want
to say in summing up our time together here?
Yes. This wonderful lady gave me
an idea on my bison my Internet
page. If you can’t beat ‘em, breed ‘em.
Great. Thank you all very much. If nobody else has any other comments or any other questions, I thank you very
much. You have been wonderful and I
have learned a lot today. I hope you
have too.