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SARE 2000 Highlights
The Farm Classroom Proves a Profitable Marketing Ploy
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| Feedback from visiting schoolchildren
(such as “This is the best tour our class has been on”) inspired Pam
and David Bosserd to create a curriculum for their young guests. Photo
by Pam Bosserd |
To teach schoolchildren two generations removed from the farm about agriculture—and
to coax their parents to her retail farmstand—Michigan farmer Pam Bosserd
developed a kid-friendly curriculum that gets at that most basic of questions:
Where does food come from? With a SARE producer grant, Bosserd created
easy-to-conceptualize demonstrations such as a pizza garden featuring
tomatoes, peppers, basil, onions, wheat for crusts, a cow for cheese and
a pig for sausage. A popular corn maze, shaped like Michigan, contains
signs telling visitors what grows in different parts of the state. The
school tours have paid off in new adult customers. With 1,500 cars a day
passing her farm near Battle Creek, Bosserd had enough customers to double
her vegetable acreage each year since she began growing produce in 1997,
injecting new profits into what used to be a more traditional row crop
and cattle farm. The school tours and seasonal offerings such as a pumpkin
scavenger hunt offer a new, dual-purpose strategy. “We get them out here
for entertainment in the fall and hand them a brochure saying we’re open
for vegetables on May 1,” she says. Bosserd hasn’t rested on her laurels;
she hopes to expand into direct sales of her farm’s beef and to grow specialty
vegetables for the Asian ethnic market. For more information, go to www.sare.org/projects/
and search for FNC98-204
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