Notes from Your Farm Fresh Team
Why we need YOU!
There
are a lot of good reasons not to
start a business, especially a farm. Small business failure rate statistics alone are enough to end the discussion before it starts. How
about the fact that the average farmer with 1 million dollars of liabilities
averages $19,000 per year as a paycheck. Or the fact that California has the
highest small business failure rate, a whopping 69% higher than the national
average. Eek!
Yep,
the odds are just not in your favor to get involved in a small community
farming venture here in the golden state.
All
the depressing statistics aside, we here at Tara Firma Farms have thoroughly
surprised ourselves. We all believe
in Tara's vision of wanting to feed the community grass-based healthy food, heal
the degraded land, strengthen the community and grow young farmers. However,
belief in a vision and knowing it is going to operate at a financially
sustainable level are two entirely different things. But the thing is: we may
have underestimated how badly our community wants this food. In just under 3
years we went from serving 0 families, to providing 750 families with pastured
raised beef, pork, chicken and eggs. You people are hung-ry!
The
other amazing thing is that we are almost turning a profit. One of the reasons
this is amazing is that just about every person we talk to about making money
in farming in California says you shouldn't buy land if you want to make money
in farming. The land values are so high here that the actual value you derive
off the land cannot cover
the cost of operations and the inflated land value at the same time. Leasing is
where it is at. While we agree, the problem is we wanted to find a piece of
land we could help regenerate and to offer the farm as a place to connect with
our membership, and a lease just wouldn't work.
Another
thing you hear a lot about in farming is that the profit margin, as in most
enterprises, is in selling direct to the consumer. For us, selling direct to
the consumer was part of the original vision.
What they often
don't say is that in order to achieve that margin an organization has to work in
a particular scale. The overhead costs we have generated as a result of
directly serving our community are high and what we have learned over the past
few months is that we have to scale them in order to cover them appropriately.
Now that doesn't mean a scale as large as we can go, because at a certain point
when serving more families, the overheads increase. If we go beyond our 1000
families we would then have to buy another delivery van, and then we would need
1250 families to cover our new overhead. So for us we are excited to get to a
sustainable level of 1000 member families and then cap our membership. After it
is capped then you can tell your friends they can join, but there is a waiting
list: You become instantly cooler.
So
here we are in May 2012, three years in, serving you, living our dreams and
excited about it. We're so excited about reaching a financially sustainable
level of operations so we can start focusing on other elements of our business
and letting our creativity fly. We envision creating a full picnic area by the
barn with a bunch of tables, grills, an outdoor kitchen and hang out space. We
want to put in a bio-diesel station so that folks can fill up their cars with
veggie derived fuel and then pick up fuel for their bodies! We see a retrofit
of the store with beautiful wooden cabinets, glass faced freezers and murals.
We envision monthly barn dances, movie nights and jam sessions (jam: music AND
fruit). We envision you bringing your ideas, passion and creativity to change
our landscape and joining us in co-creation of this wonderful place. And once
we get to a financially stable level of operations, we can begin to turn our
attention to really making this place second to none. Making YOUR farm
even more fantastic.
We
don't just have Members of the farm - we have community, and while we don't all
know each other yet, we look forward to continuing to evolve, celebrate and
hang out together. We like you - and we think we'd like your friends and
neighbors too - which is why we are giving you, our Members, groovy incentives
for referring a new Member of our community to sign up for our CSA.
As
many of you know - we have our $10 Farmbucks - Referral Program: for
every new Member that tells us that they heard of the farm through you, we
throw $10 into your WebStore account, which can really add up to a lot of free
food! AND as a special bonus for May - we are putting you all in a
lighthearted competition with each other: the Member with the most referrals in the month of May will receive one
free pasture raised Thanksgiving turkey each year for the rest of your life!!! (apologies
for the morbidity)
Now
- there are a couple folks who have excitedly jumped the gun - they have
already emailed all of their friends and asked for brochures to drop off to
their neighbors. BUT! Today is May 1st - and there hasn't been one
sign up yet this morning - so don't sweat it - we are all at zero.
We'll
be keeping the tallies coming... like this one:
GOAL: 1000 Members
CURRENT # Members: 749!
(That's YOU! THANK YOU!!!)
We
can't help but be excited about the potential!
That's
only 251 Member Slots left! Pass us your friends who are CSA-curious.
Pass us your favorite folks. Pass us your parents or your
grandchildren - anyone who's health you care about. Anyone who you'd like to hang out by the pond
and have a BBQ with. Ask them via email to sign up (see forward-able
examples in emailed newsletter) or ask them to join you for an event this month. Go ahead and sign them up as a gift for
Mother's Day or as a gift for some other reason you make up on the spot.
Lest
we forget - this isn't all just about dollars and cents, money is actually just
the means to continue doing and living and expanding the notion - that every
living thing deserves the right to live a happy and healthy life. Including us : )
So - let's go sequester some carbon -
one burger at a time!
The Farm Fresh Team at Tara Firma Farms
