Pastured Poultry Talk

Joel Salatin joins the show and we use his recent book Your Successful Farm Business (Amazon) as the back drop to the conversation. High points of the discussion:

• Your Successful Farm Business dives into the people, the marketing, the time and motion studies, and the nitty gritty about how to think like a business person.
• Marketing is morphing rapidly, especially logistics.
• There's a lot of "disturbed ground" between the farmer and how stuff gets to the customer.
• Is Amazon acquiring Whole Foods good? Who eats the price cut of this downward price pressure?
• The take on relationship marketing.
• Build it and they will come is a fantasy. You've got to grab 'em.
• Earn Trust = Conviction + Consistency + Communication.
• Joel's take on the biggest bottleneck: Processing or marketing?
• Speaking of pastured poultry processing, "How do we message living food and the whole story of helpful bacteria?"
• Moldy cheese is cool. But bacteria on a chicken is somehow different.
• The processing regulatory climate is tough for very small plants and most farmers or consumers don't have any insight into it.
• What's the reason for the high farm failure rate? Cash flow is one of the biggest issues. Pastured poultry brings cash flow as an asset, but seasonality is a challenge.
• People have fantasy expectations about farming. Your Successful Farm Business sets realistic expectations and helps you operate from a position of reality.
• Unrealistic expectations turn bumps in the road into bigger issues than they are.
• Need to develop mastery through repetition and nuance.
• Joel believes in dabbling before you commit. "It's ok to dabble."
• Create a one-year nest egg that can support you without any income. Be "cultishly" frugal.
• Wendell Berry's essay "Home Economics" talks about feeding yourself first. Those dollars don't have to be earned, and there is no tax on that.
• Half of America doesn't have access to $400 in cash. What does it mean for direct marketers?
• Food Inc, cured Joel on what people could afford. You could get two pounds of Polyface grass-finished beef for price of one Burger King meal when that movie came out. Applebees is $15 a plate. A pastured poultry chicken can feed six people with leftovers. We need to help people understand the comparisons. At Polyface, a broiler is less per pound than boneless/skinless chicken breast in the supermarket.
• Joel explains why eclectic awareness is important in the context creating points of commonalities.
• Polyface supplies a local Wegman's, but how does that jive with Joel's idea that we should be spending more time trying to get people out of the grocery store?
• There's an old business saying, "What got you here won't get you there."

Resources

• Polyface Farms
• Your Successful Farm Business by Joel Salatin
• You Can Farm by Joel Salatin (precursor and prerequisite to Your Successful Farm Business)

Sponsors

• Small Farm Nation Academy with Tim Young
• Order Ready to Lay Pullets in Pennsylvania

Update from the farm: The Christmas ducks are out on pasture in the unseasonably warm fall weather and doing well. A buyer from a cooking school visits the farm. Across the Creek Farm supplies this school already, and the buyer said they needed to source conventional chicken so that the students would have a realistic experience when they go into commercial kitchens. By exclusively training on pasture-raised chicken, the students were working with a quality that far exceeded what they would see in most kitchens. The Christmas lights in Fayetteville, AR, have earned nemesis status. Christmas tradition in the holler has been to cut a cedar tree from the farm, except that one year when a tree blew down from the overpass. Farmer Update The University of Arkansas is about to run a field trial with Across the Creek on feeding alternative sources of fish meal from invasive Asian Carp. If it works, we could find a replacement for ocean harvested menhaden in the future. How to From Christmas lights, trees, and bridge trolls, the conversation finds its way to peat moss for brooder bedding. What's the experience of peat moss in the brooder, anyway? Spence and Producer Mike reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly about using peat bedding.

Tim Young of Small Farm Nation joins the show to discuss business, marketing, and farming. Tim is one of those guys who left a successful corporate career to farm full time. After successfully building that business, he's made yet another transition that more closely reflected his family's life goals. Today, he's a homestead food producer who teaches farmers about business and marketing. Here is a sampling of the tidbits in this show:

• Why people fall short of what Joel Salatin has achieved?
• What does scale and efficiency look like?
• Don't romanticize small. Romanticize what small is and small is handcrafted.
• Marketing is intimidating. The point of marketing is to lower the cost of selling.
• There are many different parts to marketing, but they all have a common goal.
• Every farm needs to have a brand.
• Marketing is an afterthought for many people.
• Are you running a farm as a business or a hobby?
• You are an entrepreneur.
• Entrepreneurs burn their bridges behind them. Lose that day job.
• Working through the side hustles of an agrarian life.
• We admire the farmers who are entrepreneurs.
• Tim's take on the ideal customer and why it's not his focus.
• Get your message out and share your passion.
• Tim was selling trust on his farm.
• Farmers as marketers have a chance to be much more positive about their message.
• Tim takes us inside the Small Farm Nation Academy.
• Conversion ratios are not just for feed; your website has one too. And other website optimizations.
• Does podcasting work for local farms?
• Favorite resource: Canva.
• Favorite books: Omnivore's Dilemma. Soil Health by Sir Albert Howard. Old books, pre-industrial agriculture.
• Advice: "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

Stay in Touch: Tim Young's Small Farm Nation Academy and Podcast. Subscribe to the Pastured Poultry Talk: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher

On The Fighting Farmer, Spence goes into mouth watering detail about what makes pasture-raised duck different and provides some helpful tips on cooking it up. Sorghum glazed duck and duck fat roasted potatoes, anyone? The processing facility has been a hub of community, providing connections to growers, chefs, and neighbors. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the facility caught fire, but the damage is being repaired. No equipment lost. Across the Creek Farm has been a center for making personal connections around the farm life for a long time now, especially around veterans. Listen in as Spence remembers friend Jacob George. Jacob's music is the intro and outro of the podcast. Castrating pigs on the farm is just a way of life for some folk. Find out why we do it. In any livestock farm, there are always some issues that pop up. The conversation turns from castration to scrotal hernias and what that means for the herd. Stay in touch: Have a question for the podcast? Email Producer Mike. Want to reach out to Spence? Try Facebook. Subscribe to the show: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher

Terrell Spencer (we just call him Spence) joins the Pastured Poultry Talk network to chat about farm life. Spence is a full-time pastured poultry farmer at Across the Creek Farm near Fayetteville, Arkansas. The "Fighting Farmer"is rooted in the fact that Spence is a veteran of the Army, and farming often seems like a fight. Perseverance is key. In this initial episode, we meet Spence and talk about the goals of the podcast. In a nutshell, he wants people to have a realistic view of what it takes to farm and to give back to the community as a distribution hub of information and community. As the broiler season winds down in Northwest Arkansas, we chat about:

• A problem at the market makes it hard to sell ducks for Thanksgiving
• Those problems inspire some farm projects
• Shelter designs at Across the Creek Farm
• Why broiler production is seasonal

Fighting Farmer will be a twice-monthly feature of Pastured Poultry Talk where Spence talks through the farm updates for his customers and for his peers. He's a first generation farmer, and he's appeared on the podcast before as a co-host and as a guest (PPT039, PPT038, PPT037, PPT035, PPT010).

Today, I bring you the audio portion of APPPA's "Pastured Poultry: Better Way Forward" video and then I talk with one of the video's main characters, David Hale of Windy Meadows Farm. The video differentiates pastured poultry from all the other options and explains what it is. David and I talk through these ideas, as they related to the video:

• What makes pastured poultry special?
• What kind of customer do you have? Do they prefer taste or nutrition?
• Who does the marketing at Windy Meadows Family Farm?
• Is pastured poultry ready to be chicken for everyone?
• How will David Hale share and talk about the Better Way Forward video and get to a bigger audience?
• Being prepared to talk about your farm and practices in a marketable way.

Watch the video, here:

In this show, I take some momentum from episode 58 and talk about prospecting for new customers using email cold calls and email marketing services. There's a quick technology detour as I introduce Mozilla Thunderbird, which is how I do all my day-to-day email activities, including prospecting. Email prospecting is how I start out almost every business and I use it to find customers from nothing. You can't talk email marketing without talking about websites and sales funnels. I wrap this whole conversation up into a simple system: website > email sign-up > talk to customers. The bottom line is that email is simple and effective. Anyone can use it to sell chicken and it scales with your business. I even discuss the difference between spam and email marketing. But email marketing's biggest impediment is you. Check out this short course from Aweber, my email hosting provider of choice, for a more in-depth look at using email to capture leads. It's my affiliate link.

Learn how to grow your email list in less than 4 hours with step-by-step, expert guidance in six short and simple lessons.

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Farmer, marketer, and author Charlotte Smith joins the podcast to talk about relationship marketing, or as she puts it, farm marketing from the heart. The farm's signature product is raw milk with diversified offerings of eggs, chicken, and turkey. The inspiration for Charlotte's 3 Cow Marketing service came from the realization that she sold out of her products when the neighboring farms struggled even though they were selling comparable productions. People started asking her for help. In this show we talk about what it means to know your dream customer and discuss:

• The high failure rate of new farms. 80% fail within the second year.
• How to avoid competition and price push back.
• The differences between an on-farm store with hours versus an honor system.
• Why it's important to set aside marketing time.
• What farmers can do to position their farms for success.
• Advice for marketing pastured poultry while employed at an off-farm job.
• Growing beyond those first 20 customers.
• Building relationships with people you may never meet.
• The difference between talking and listening with your customers.
• You're a rockstar and your customer wants to hear what you have to say.
• Should you as a farmer write a book for your customers?

Charlotte's favorite resource: Email marketing software from MailerLite (It's free for the first 1,000 emails). Recommended book: Joel Salatin's Your Successful Farm Business. Contact Charlotte 3 cow Marketing The Profitable Farm Faceboook Group Books from Episode

Dr. Michael Rothrock of USDA joins the show to discuss bacteria on pastured poultry. He overviews his research into the common food safety bacteria: campylobacter, salmonella, listeria, and E. Coli. He's not trying to figure out how pastured poultry compares to conventional poultry production. Rather, he's trying to figure out how "well" each individual farm is doing, and then work in the context of that farm. Not all bacteria has human health impacts, so it's vitally important to know what we're dealing with. In other words, not all salmonella is equal. And in Dr. Rothrock's research, he's setting out to identify as much bacteria as possible and then determine its type. Contact: Michael J. Rothrock Jr., Ph.D. Research Microbiologist USDA-ARS US National Poultry Research Center 706-546-3072 (office) [email protected] Sponsors: This podcast brought to you by Henlight, a fully automated solar powered lighting system for pastured egg flocks.

Today, Dave shares a new 300 broiler design that scales up the typical small-batch design of the Salatin shelters, but falls short of the size found in large scale mobile housing, such as the Mobile Range Coop. I''s a great middle ground design for those of one small pastures, including silvopastures. And thanks to Irma, we know these shelter designs can weather a hurricane. Ginger also talks us through how Pastured Life Farm does layer housing in the Florida climate.

• Resources Mentioned: Pastured Life Farm: Facebook
• Henlight supplemental light system.