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.

Our Expanded Referral Program for May!

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