What does it take to run a successful u-pick business?
Today on the Thriving Farmer Podcast Michael is joined by his wife, Savannah, to discuss their first season of offering u-pick strawberries at The Farm on Central. The Farm on Central is a small family farm located in Carlisle, Ohio and provides the community with a wide array of vegetables, mushrooms, and horticultural products. In this episode, Michael and Savannah talk about the benefits of offering a premium product and running a profitable value-added program. They also go over how they manage their fields of annual bed strawberries, their ticket system for scheduling u-pick, things that worked well, and lessons learned for next season.
Join us today to hear how Michael and the team ran a successful first year of u-pick strawberries!
In This Episode:
How many strawberry plants they planted this year 1:50
How their strawberry growing system differs from others 2:09
What type of ticketing system they used to sell slots for u-pick 5:24
The options people had at u-pick 6:49
How they created a buzz 11:28
U-pick management and organization 14:02
The rules they set for customers 17:16
Learning opportunities from the season 23:51, 26:26
Field Management 27:13
Products used: 28:29
How they spaced their sections 29:39
A huge takeaway 31:48
How many people came to the farm for u-pick in just three weeks 34:15
About the Guests:
Growing Farmers is led by Michael Kilpatrick, a farmer, educator, and inventor who lives in Ohio. He is the host of the top-rated Thriving Farmer Podcast and Thriving Farmer Summit series, which has been viewed by over 50,000 farmers. He has managed large farms and businesses, consulted for industry experts around the world, and spoken at dozens of conferences. Michael believes that anyone can farm by following the simple business and management skills that he teaches in Small Farm University, a community he founded for thriving farmers. Together with his wife, Savannah, they are raising their three young children at The Farm on Central.
Resources:
Website: https://www.growingfarmers.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/growingfarmerswithmichael
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/growingfarmers
And if you want to keep the conversation going, join us in our Facebook Group to connect with us and other farmers looking to grow their business!
We also have six free eguides to help you be more effective on your farm (Winter Growing, Pastured Poultry, Washing Shed Efficiency, Profitable Farmers Toolkit, What to Look for in a Farm Property, etc), which you can download here.
The Thriving Farmer Podcast Team would like to thank our amazing sponsor!
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Julie
June 15, 2022 8:24 pmGreat podcast you two! You had discussed a phone tree. We just switched this year to google voice for the $20 / month. It’s a bit tricky to set up and is not perfect, but we were able to port our main farm number over to it and set up the auto attendant using audio files we recorded & uploaded from twistedwave.com. Now I only have to record the daily picking updates portion of the phone tree instead of recording a huge massive message with all the details. The thing I like is that any voicemails are instantly transcribed and the mp3 file is attached to an email sent to me. I can also use google voice on my cell phone and call people back from my cell phone with my cell phone number disguised as our farm’s phone line. I can also have calls ring my phone at the same time and I know that they are from customers because the caller ID shows up as our farm name along with the callers #. The main issue I have is that since our main number is set up as the auto attendant, I cannot also assign it to our VOIP poly phone to call out on. That phone was assigned a different number, so we can’t call customers back from that phone. So dumb, but it is what it is. Overall – we’re glad we set up the auto attendant.