Marketing

Advancing the Frontier of Marketing

Project Sampler | Getting the Word Out | Fair Trade Strategy for Northeast "Eco-Growers"

Never before have American consumers cared more about how and where their food is produced. This provides a perfect opportunity for farmers and ranchers across the country to creatively direct market their products and capture more of the consumer dollar. Farmers markets, value-added products, pick-your-own farms, Internet sales and marketing to restaurants are just a few ways farmers are putting the power to turn a profit back in their own hands.

SARE supports this new breed of innovator, investing country-wide in a diverse array of marketing research and on-the-ground initiatives. To leverage even more support, SARE has partnered with USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service to further develop new and emerging marketing opportunities.

Today's markets pose grave challenges but also unprecedented opportunities for America's farmers and ranchers. Helping producers tap all the markets have to offer will remain central to SARE's funding portfolio.

Project Sampler

In Iowa, Jeff and Jill Burkhart had already opened an on-farm bottling plant and creamery before they received a SARE grant to test two marketing strategies: an open house and a website. To include other farmers in their venture, they turned the creamery store into a local foods marketplace, featuring farm products from 76 other Iowa families.
In Mississippi, more than 400 educators and processors received training in sugar cane and sorghum syrup production, processing and value-added marketing. Syrup prices increased more than four fold, returning nearly $2,562,000 to producers during the four-year project, all thanks to a SARE project at Alcorn State University.
In the Northeast, SARE launched a farmer-educator program to ramp up educational efforts. Elizabeth Henderson, a renowned expert in community supported agriculture and a SARE farmer-educator, used SARE funding to help producers assess potential csa ventures.
The Southwest Marketing Network, a collaborative of tribal communities and farmers, ranchers and service providers in the Four Corner states, used a SARE grant to develop "distance learning tools" to increase producers' profitability. The tools - training videos and dvds - taught nearly 500 producers and buyers about such topics as cold-frame building and season extension.

Getting the Word Out
SARE's bulletin Marketing Strategies for Farmers and Ranchers offers tips and farmers' stories on how to get started. Farmers can dig deeper with SARE's book How to Direct Market Your Beef, the online Direct Marketing Resource Guide, and the SARE-funded Legal Guide for Direct Farm Marketing.

	Above, Michael Rozyne, founder of Red Tomato. Below, Red Tomato's marketing savvy on display with its Eco Apple branding. Photo by Jerry DeWitt

Fair Trade Strategy for Northeast "Eco-Growers"

For Northeast apple farmers it was a matter of survival. Facing a perfect storm of rising land, oil and labor prices, along with fierce competition from China and Chile, the apple farmers needed to find new revenue streams fast. They began a collaboration with Red Tomato, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization that helps connect consumers to family farmers who sell products grown with organic, integrated pest management (IPM) and biodynamic farming methods.

The apple farmers and Red Tomato launched Eco Apple, a project that markets locally grown apples certified by the IPM Institute of North America. The number of producers in the program quickly doubled, and Red Tomato's marketing savvy has placed their apples in national chains like Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and Stop & Shop, among others. Sales of Eco Apples have jumped from 7,500 cases in 2003 to almost 50,000 cases in 2007.

Eco Apple is just one program of Red Tomato, which has been helping farmers maximize volume, quality and price for more than 10 years. SARE was one of Red Tomato's early supporters, awarding a grant that got the group off the ground and allowed it to experiment with different ways to help farmers. In those first years, Red Tomato tried acting as a distributor for small farmers' products. Enormous costs and brutal competition, however, forced it to shift to its current focus on marketing. "SARE recognized early on how important it was to support us at such an early stage," says Red Tomato founder Michael Rozyne. "They gave us money at the most crucial moment."

Rozyne was one of the original founders of Equal Exchange, an international coffee company that ensures fair prices for producers. With stiff competition squeezing many American small farmers out of business, Rozyne decided to implement a similar program for farmers at home. Starting with six producers, the organization now works with 30 in the Northeast and 12 in the South, mostly fruit and vegetable growers.

John Lyman of Lyman Orchards, one of Eco Apple's originators, says that Red Tomato's pricing strategy was essential to his orchard's success. "They get a good premium on our produce, which we didn't get ourselves. Rather than a one-price-fits-all philosophy, they believe in the value of differentiation. With other brokers, you might be one of many, but with Red Tomato, their focus is on the supplier. The big difference with them is loyalty."

When SARE originally awarded its grant in 2002, a handful of Red Tomato producers collectively earned $500,000. In 2007, the 42 producers working with the organization made an impressive $2.1 million. With sustainable farming growing fast in the Northeast, Red Tomato's strategies are critical for ensuring fair trade for small-scale "eco-growers". [For more information, go to www.sare.org/projects and search for LNE02-165.]

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