The Urban Farmer: Hacking the Farmers Market. Tips and Tactics for Selling Your Farm Products Through Farmer’s Markets and CSAs (FSFS19)

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Farm Sales Models

  • If you are banking on selling via a CSA, then do people in your area know what a CSA is?
  • Ask the question – “What are the successful people doing?”  That applies to your area, customer base, and your business.
  • CSA’s depend on a supportive customer base that has faith in the farmer and wants to support that farmer’s story.
  • “You have to craft your reputation as a farmer to sell CSA shares.”
  • Talk to other people in your industry to stay up to date.  What’s working, what isn’t.  What innovations are out there.
  • The data that you accumulate when engaging with customers is critical to how you can make future decisions.
  • “The more you learn, the more you know to look for.”

Farmer’s Market Keys

  • Set yourself apart.  The image that you portray is important.
  • Learn how to be yourself and be comfortable with that.  Let your character shine through.
  • “People don’t come to a farmers market to stand in a grocery store isle, they come for the experience.”
  • How your products are displayed is key.  Show abundance.
  • How your stall looks is important – the table clothes, have you verticalized your stall, have a lot to look at (posters of the farm).
  • Be a good orator.  People go to farmers markets for the experience – think what’s your story. 
  • If you’re not a people person, don’t do the farmers market.  Find someone who does.
  • How do you present yourself at the market?  Are you approachable?
  • How do you invite people in without making them feel like they will be sold too.
  • Don’t be sitting at your booth.
  • Spend some time to learn basic body language fundamentals.
  • Invest in customers that you see value in.  Don’t invest in customers that are trying to cheapen your product.
  • Be careful offering discounts and bartering.  It opens a Pandora’s box by setting precedence for the future.

Learn More from Curtis Stone:

Read The Urban Farmer book

Listen to The Urban Farmer audiobook

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