Starting with Direct Sales
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EmailFebruary 28, 2025
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In this presentation, Mariel Borgman invites growers to consider various direct to consumer sales options through the lenses of skills, resources, and farm goals
Mariel Borgman is a community food systems educator with MSU Extension, working to support the development of accessible, equitable, fair, healthy, diverse and sustainable food systems across Michigan.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/
Video Transcript
Welcome, everybody to MI Ag Ideas to Grow With. Today is the last installment of the vegetable track. We've got a good one, starting with direct sales, which I'm looking forward to listening to Mariel. I know she's going to do a great job. Um I wanted to acknowledge our sponsor, AgriStrategies, LLC Steve Kluemper, I know is with us today. AgriStrategies has been a sponsor of MI Ag Ideas from its conception, so we really appreciate that. I also want to mention our farm stress resources. It's a really stressful time in agriculture or it can be, MSU has resources and people to help. And with that, I'd like to introduce Mariel Borgman. She's going to talk to us today about direct sales and let's get started, Mariel. Great. Thank you so much, Ben. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mariel Borgman. I'm a community food systems educator with MSU Extension. I'm excited to be with you today to be talking about getting started with direct sales. Before we get into specifics around direct sales, I just wanted to talk a little bit about marketing in general and with how this fits in with direct sales of your products. So within marketing, we have you, your farm business or you as an individual, and you have a set of goals that you would like to see come out of your sales strategy. Then you have your product. So that's unique. We saw some examples of what those products might be. And with your product, there's a lot of other pieces like the packaging of the product or how you're talking about what value that product brings or what solutions that product offers, and then the customer. The person who's looking to buy that, they're looking for a specific item, but they're also looking maybe for an experience of buying local. Or they're looking for some value added. In the example of flowers, maybe they're looking to buy a bouquet for a special occasion or with the herbal tinctures, they're looking to not just buy herbs, but looking to buy a product that was made for them locally by someone that raised that. There's a lot of pieces to each of these things. The important part to get to in your marketing and sales strategy is really that sweet spot where you're connecting the right product with the customer who's looking to buy that specific product or experience. All of these pieces fit together to find that right match between your farm goals, your product, and the customer. Obviously, other things go into this equation like pricing and how you position your product in the marketplace and we'll get into some of that too, but I just wanted to ground us in that idea of finding that marketing sweet spot. Then just again, some overview as we get started today. When we're talking about direct sales, we also sometimes use the term local or local marketing, just wanted to ground us in some basics around marketing products locally. So it's really important to understand your customer and the target market. Today, we'll talk through a number of different markets that are available within the direct sales realm, and then a little bit about the customers, but that could be a whole presentation of itself as really focusing in on that customer. The other key thing with local marketing is to build a strong brand for your farm. So customers that are buying local are often looking to build a connection with the person that's producing their food. And so having a strong brand presence for them helps to kind of connect them with your farm. You can show the values of your farm through your branding and keep that consistency that the customer is going to recognize you whether you're selling at a farmers market or a farm stand or in a grocery store, they'll be able to easily make that connection back to your farm. These days, there's a lot of online marketing tools that can be super helpful for direct marketing. We'll talk just a little bit about those, as well as some face to face opportunities. There's tons of opportunities when you're selling locally to partner with businesses in your community. We'll get into a couple examples of those, but really the possibilities for partnering with local businesses are endless. Don't forget about those chances to lean on other small businesses to really have some great partnerships. And then it's really important when you're doing direct marketing to engage with your local community so they know who you are and what you have to offer. So let's talk about how to connect with these customers and connect with your local community. We'll start with some digital options. When we talk about digital marketing, one of the most important things that you can have is a website. It doesn't have to be fancy, but people are really going online to learn about businesses and it's pretty critical these days that you have a website. I do see a lot of farms that have just a social media presence. But the thing about a website is that you actually have control over that. Social media platforms could potentially disappear at some point in time, you don't own your space on there per se. Also, Um, there are different algorithms that are used to show who gets to see your content. You don't really have control over how people can find your content on social media, whereas with the website, you have total control over that. It also can be really helpful if you are looking to do any online sales to have that based have your website as well. But even if you're not, it's really important to have that website. The other critical digital marketing piece is to make sure that you have a Google business profile and that that's up to date. And what that means is basically when someone goes into Google and searches for farm near me or local farm or something like that, that your business is going to pop up and they'll be able to see we've all done a Google search for a restaurant or something like that, and you see the little photos and the name of the business and their contact information and the hours that they're open and a link to their website and a phone number. And that's one of the main ways that people are searching for and finding businesses that they want to support. So having that in existence and up to date is really critical. So social media can also be important if you have the time and energy to do that. Lots of opportunities there. Again, this could all be its own presentations, but I just want to give a little bit of overview because it is so important when doing direct marketing to have these points of connection with your customers. Email marketing is really, really important too. A lot of people are like, Oh, I don't know that people read emails and is that worth my time? But the people that are really, really interested in your farm, this is a great way to connect with them. If you have their email address, if they've given that to you, they've opted in that they're interested in what your farm is doing and what you have to say. They're more likely to actually buy from you than someone just liking your post on social media. There's also a number of great online directories that you can post your business information in most of the time for free, sometimes with a membership. But this is a great way also to just get your name and your business information out there. Here's a list of a few that are available in Michigan. Two really quick resources I wanted to share if you are interested in exploring digital marketing the more and learning about it. Taste the Local Difference is a Michigan based company that specializes in local food marketing, they have a lot of resources to offer. We can get these links in the chat later on too, but the QR code will take you to their site. There's also a really awesome podcast called My Digital Farmer, that's put on by a farmer named Corinna Bench, and it's just full of lots of great information about digital marketing. We can't forget our good old fashioned face to face marketing. Those who are going to farmers' markets, a great opportunity to connect with customers. It does take a lot of time to attend a farmers' market, but it's also an opportunity to build those relationships and potentially meet customers that may get your product through other direct sales channels later on as well. You can go visit chefs in local grocery stores, have conversations with them, show them examples of your products. A lot of local and direct marketing is really built on relationships. Get out there, meeting people, having conversations about what you have to offer is a super important skill. Again, other opportunities to partner with local businesses, workshops and learning opportunities are really popular right now, so a lot of times businesses will be willing to host some educational event, for example, there's some people building bouquets or wreaths in the photos here, you could host that at a local coffee shop or a brewery. It's a win win for both businesses. Other opportunities would be to do, for example, drop off pick up sites for CSA boxes at a local business and things like that. Also opportunities to host events on the farm to get people out there to see what your farm is all about. These are endless as well. You can host workshops on your farm instead of at a local business. You can have field trips, you could have tours. You can charge for all these things too. It's another opportunity for income that's not just related to your product, but more of that experience. So lots and lots and lots of opportunities. Again, just a quick overview of those before we really dive into the different market channel opportunities. But I'm happy to answer questions about any of those. I see there's a few things in the chat, but is there any questions that have come through? Not yet, Mariel, I put the URLs for those two websites you mentioned in there. Oh, great. Thank you so much for doing that. All right. Let's move on and talk through a little bit about these different direct market channel options. I'll say this isn't an exhaustive list of all of the options that are out there, but there's some of the more popular ones we'll cover today. Here is a great overview from Missouri extension of different characteristics of various market channels. Not all of these are direct market channels, but more of the top half would fall into that direct market channel bucket, I suppose you would say. It's helpful to look at some of these different aspects at a glance and match those up with your skills and interests as a farmer. So we know not everybody wants to spend a lot of time talking to customers. So people are just more interested in growing food and that's okay. You have different options. If you're not super interested in having conversations with the public and building relationships and all of that, it's not to say that direct market channels are not necessarily something you should explore, but what you may want to explore is hiring someone to do that that does enjoy that type of work and that's really good at it. This chart is just helpful, I think, to think about some of these different times, time required on your part, contact with customers. Also pricing, degree of price stability, and then volume too. One thing about direct market channels is that oftentimes, um, They are a good fit for moving smaller volumes, and this is all relative. We have farms of all different sizes in Michigan. But generally, wholesale channels are great for large volumes of products and direct market, maybe smaller volumes of products. But there's a mix there within. It's a spectrum depending on the market channel. Again, this is just at a glance, but I do think it's helpful to see these different categories and be able to look at the different opportunities through that lens. So let's start with one market channel and dig in a little bit into what it looks like. CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture, sometimes also called a food box, sometimes also called a subscription or a membership. It goes by all different names. But essentially, it's this idea that the customers are buying in to purchase a share of the farm, which is like a subscription or a membership. Each week throughout the season, the customer had signed an agreement with the farm that they'll receive a portion of the harvest for that week. Typically, this has been mostly done on vegetable farms, but I know of a lot of flowers CSAs, Some people are doing value added CSAs, meat CSA, it's really not limited to any particular product. It could be a model that works for a lot of different things, but the traditional CSA would be a vegetable box that has a variety of different vegetables each week going to that customer. There's a lot of variations on the CSA model, especially in recent years. So there's opportunity for customers to choose which products they get. In the traditional one, it was like you get whatever's available that week and the farmer picks what's going in your box. But now there's a lot of software in different ways that the CSA is set up so customers can select which products they would like if they don't like beets or kale or whatever it is. There's also options instead of, um, selling an individual weekly box to sell an amount of credit. A lot of times farms are getting a market card, which is essentially a gift card, you preload that with a certain amount and then you can spend that down throughout the year, either at the farmers market or on a farm stand or various other opportunities. A lot of CSA farms, especially the vegetable farms are buying products from other farms to try to add variety to that subscription. If you have flowers for sale or fruit, if you don't want to do your own CSA, you can find another CSA farm and sell your products to them. Okay. We also are seeing this more from these traditional CSA programs, which were really designed where people are paying upfront at the beginning of the season. The farmer has that money at the beginning of the season and also is really community member focused to some more CSA like programs which are more sales focused. They're more just a box program coming from multiple farms and things like that. This is all to say that there's a ton of space for innovation within this model and lots of opportunity to play around with it and see what works best for your farm. Some really important things for a CSA, particularly for a vegetable CSA, or one where you're trying to provide a lot of variety to customers, would be really important to have your crop planning skills down to be able to have a consistent supply of really high quality produce items consistently throughout the year. Most CSAs are 20 weeks or more, being able to fulfill the number of subscriptions you have is really important and understanding how much of those items you're going to need every week and making sure everything gets seeded and harvested on time. Or knowing how much you'll need to buy from other farms to supplement what you can grow on your own. There's also a lot of logistics to figure out. Sometimes CSAs will be set up where people will come to the farm to pick up, but other times, people are already going to farmers market, so they'll bring the CSA shares there for customers to pick up or partnering with local businesses to have a site for people to pick up. These are all just different questions of things you should think about if you're wanting to start this a model, and also think about if things will need to be kept cold, how you'll manage that throughout the process. Customer service is really, really important with all direct marketing, but especially for CSA because these are people who have made an investment and they have chosen to invest in your farm for this year. You are their farmer for the year. They're really looking for that personal connection with you. They're hoping to hear from you, having a newsletter or some other communication throughout the year and just an easy way for them to sign up and place their orders is going to be really important. We have some great CSA resources. Michigan has a CSA network. We have resources for farmers and consumers on the website. We also have regular meetings for farmers to join and they're mostly webinars, learning opportunities about various topics. We just had one actually as part of this conference all about applying for grants. Then there's a national CSA Innovation Network as well. They do regular webinars. They have coffee chats, they have all different kinds of ways to participate as a farmer and learn more about what's going on in CSA. Okay. Next, I don't see any questions I missed. Thank you, Ben for putting more of those links in for folks. Next, we're going to talk about online sales or ecommerce. This ties in to CSA a lot as well because most CSAs have at this point, some online sales platform to help manage their CSA program. The advantage to that is, especially if you're offering that choice opportunity, people can select what they want and these programs can actually help build your harvest schedules. It's great in and of itself, but it's also really helpful if you have, for example, a CSA program that can actually help sometimes manage the work of that for you. Not advancing. There we go. Again, you can enhance your existing sales channels. You can also offer pre ordering for the farmers market if you're going there, for example, just a lot of other functionality that you can have besides just having that web platform. It does add some complexity because now you're introducing a software program that you have to manage and update inventory for and such. Keep that in mind. So one thing to ask is how tech savvy you are or your staff. Again, this is something that if it's not a skill you have, you could potentially hire someone to work on this piece of your business for you. There's a lot of different platform options out there, so it's important to really look at those and find one that fits your farm needs. They all do slightly different things. Then so not only do you have to set up the program, but there's also that ongoing inventory management and site maintenance, and so you'll have to have someone managing that for your farm on an ongoing basis. There's a couple of really great resources that exist today. There's one also that's coming very soon, so keep an eye out. It'll get posted to the, our CSA network in Michigan and also the national one when it's ready. But these are the two that are out there right now. They're a little bit outdated, which is why this new one is coming, but they're still pretty good. There's just some of these platforms that don't exist anymore. Like Harvey, for example, is one that no longer is servicing farm businesses. But this is a great chart, just as a starting point. It talks about all the different features of the different software systems that are out there, what they do or don't do at a glance. This is one that was put out by the National Young Farmers Coalition. Both of these resources you can find on those two CSA network websites that were shared earlier. This is another really great one and I love this one because it's a farmer to farmer ecommerce report. It is based on actual experiences by farmers that rated these different platforms on a number of different factors and then provided some feedback as well. These are farmers who have used the software to see how it works with their business and then they're providing that direct feedback. Both of those tools are super helpful in deciding which platform might be best for your farm. Let's see if you check in the chat again. Great. Thanks, Ben. Ben's continuing to be a rockstar putting all those links directly in the chat if you want to check those out. Next, we're going to talk a little bit about selling things from your farm. Again, this is another thing that has many different names. You hear it called a farm market, a farm stand, a farm store, a roadside stand on farm retail. This often changes also depending on the size and scope of what you're doing. Okay. But essentially on farm retail, there's a lot of options there and it's a way to bring customers to your farm. What you're offering when people come to your farm is an experience beyond just the products. They're coming to your farm to see a farm and to buy directly from a farm, which is a vastly different shopping experience than the grocery store or even the farmers market. That's really cool. You can build on that experience and make that a really good one so they'll keep coming back. One thing to know about On farm retail is that it is subject to local zoning and building ordinances, you'll want to make sure you know what those are for your area so that you are staying within those guidelines. There's a couple of different examples of what this could look like. On the left hand side, we have a repurposed wagon type structure that could be non permanent, just pulled out by the tractor for the season. Maybe that lower initial investment, it's not open year round. Um, versus what we have on the right is a very beautifully built retail store that's obviously a higher investment, permanent structure. There's electricity involved, um, a lot of components there. And this one might be also seasonal, but it could offer year round shopping opportunities as well. So location becomes really important when you're getting people out to your farm. How do they find you? This is where some of those online directories, especially the Michigan Farm Fun Directory. That one is all for agri tourism experiences in Michigan. How do you get people to know that your farm is even open for visitors and then can they find you? What does your signage look like? Are you near a busy route where you're just able to capture people who are already driving that direction? Then parking also becomes a big issue. Do you have enough space to accommodate parking for folks that are coming out to visit? Another thing that you want to consider anytime you bring people out to your farm is talking to your insurance agent about the liability of bringing people onto your farm and what kind of coverage they would recommend depending on the types of activities that you're doing. Hey, Mariel. Steve, put a link in the chat to getfarmish.com. It looks like online sales platform. Great. Yes. Thank you for that, Steve. Yeah. Again, when we have that new one out there, we'll also make sure that folks can see because that'll have the latest list of all of the software companies that exist. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. The question about figuring out how much parking that. That is a great question, and I think that's one of those things that you may not know until you start because you could do some market research to see visit other farms in the area if anybody else is doing this type of thing. Visit other farms in Michigan that are doing a similar type of store you'd like to have and get a sense of what their parking lots look like. But yeah, I think it does depend, but you'll have to do a little bit of research. And then does Michigan print a farm map for sales and you pick? The one that I just mentioned, the Michigan Farm Fun, they have a digital guide, but also they print out a guide. It goes to all of the different welcome centers in Michigan and they also distribute it at different businesses throughout the state as well. That's a really great one and it's usually divided by region, so people can look in West Central Michigan and see all the different farms that have those types of on farm opportunities. Great questions. One more thing on this topic of on farm retail is thinking about how you want to staff that. Obviously, if you have a roadside stand that's very simple, you may be able to get away with the honor system, just having a box out there for people to put cash in or have a link to your Venmo or Cash App or anything if you are doing digital payments. But you may want to also consider staffing depending on if you have really busy times. Unfortunately, sometimes self serve stands do sometimes struggle with theft, so that's something to keep in mind, depending on the value of the products out there and such. That's a decision you'll have to consider. Other things would be when are your hours going to be open, making sure to update that on your website, on your Google profile, and advertising when you're open and where you are and all that. Another thing is, what kinds of payments will you accept? Oftentimes, cash is king, but people these days don't always carry cash and credit card can be very useful. Um, I've even seen some on farm stands that have just an iPad out for people to do self serve credit card with their phone number in case there's any problems with it. That is an option if you feel comfortable doing something like that. But generally with a credit card, you would maybe have to think about staffing and having a cash register and all of that kind of thing. Also, Snap, or in Michigan, the bridge card is a great opportunity. People can use those at farm stands and if the farm gets authorized to accept it, so there's a process that you can go through for that. There's also a great program called Double Up Food Bucks, which works with SNAP, that actually allows people to get extra money, extra benefits to spend on produce items. So if you grow produce, that's definitely a type of currency you might want to explore. Then there's also apps like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, things like that that you could use as well. You also want to consider your product mix. So Will you sell only products that you produce or bring in other items. It is important to know how much you're selling of your own products versus products that you're bringing in in order to be in compliance with what's called the farm market GAAMPs in Michigan. Definitely a resource that you'll want to check out if you're thinking of starting a farm market. It stands for generally accepted agricultural management practices, and there's one specifically around farm markets. Another thing is a lot of our products in Michigan are seasonal. How will the customers know what you have available at any given time? And do you need any additional licensing to produce or sell certain products? Typically, this doesn't apply for fruits and vegetables and flowers and things like that. But for selling nursery plants like transplants, you would need nursery licensing for that. For any kind of value added product, you'll want to explore whether you need a license to produce that. So definitely do a little research there, and MSU Extension has resources to help you figure that out. We consider on farm stores to be a type of agritourism, tourism around agriculture, but there's other types of agritourism out there and there's an endless list of possibilities in inviting people to have an experience related to agriculture in Michigan. Basically, agritourism is welcoming visitors to the farm for the purposes of either educating or entertaining, sometimes both at the same time, and it's for the purpose of generating revenue for the farm. This can be a really, really important component of your farm business because sometimes those opportunities to generate revenue from tourism activities can be a much higher margin than our agricultural products themselves. It's definitely something we encourage farms to consider as part of their marketing portfolio. It's also such a great way to connect with those customers who are looking to really form that personal connection to a farm and they are likely to participate, to come back and participate in other agr tourism activities as well as buy your products. This diagram just offers some of the many possibilities for agritourism, education, and entertainment opportunities. So obviously, direct sales are a big piece of it, things like farm stands or U-PICK operations, but also think about ways to incorporate, um Things like outdoor recreation. This is an awesome opportunity. Sometimes even for the off season, I've seen people offer snowshoeing or cross country skiing through their orchards in the winter. It's a way to generate revenue when you don't really have anything to sell at the moment. We talked about those workshops, but even just like tours of the farm, you can charge for farm tours and people are very happy to pay for that educational entertainment experience. Things like hosting people on the farm for farm stays is becoming really popular. People are setting up camping, Airbnb, or just regular Bnb experiences where people are getting to actually be on the farm, even potentially help out with some of the farm tasks. It's a growing form of tourism. Tons of possibilities here. Basically, the limit is your imagination. Okay. There's some questions in the chat, looks like about licensing for selling plants that our participants are helping to answer. So thank you for that. That's not something that I have a lot of expertise in, but we definitely have folks at MSU Extension that can offer assistance with that. Again, for any type of agritourism activity, just like with the farms, how are people going to find you? Do you have adequate parking? If they're traveling long distances to your farm and spending a lot of time on your farm, you'll also want to think about things like toilet facilities, maybe offering food. A lot of times I'm working in agritourism spaces, the goal is to try to keep people on the farm for as long as possible. Offering them a lot of different things to do. That might not be your goal if this isn't a huge part of your business, but it may be. Things to consider. How are you going to support people as they're there on your farm? Again, making sure to chat with your insurance agent to know if you need to add any insurance to cover what they're going to be doing on the farm. Make sure you're really clear and honest with the insurance agent about what folks will be doing on the farm so that they can get you that appropriate coverage. As always, customer service comes into play. So just like farm stands, when will you be open? When will certain activities be offered, depending on how crowded you get in the future, you might want to think about timing and ticketing and things like that. There's a whole lot of resources out there for figuring that stuff out. Um, and then again, you have the option to contract services out. So if you don't have the time to put on a workshop, you could bring in an instructor to teach the workshop for you, like a chef, for example, or a floral designer. So those are types of options that you have to still offer that experience for folks. It's really, really, really important to know what your zoning regulations are. Agritourism can be kind of a squishy area. And what I mean by that is that, uh, what the definition of what is an agricultural activity is changing and it's not always set in stone. And as we continue to push the boundaries of what has been considered an agricultural farming activity in the past, there's often conflicts that come up with people who regulate land use. So this is an ongoing conversation that MSU Extension has been really working on in recent years, and so as the Michigan Agritourism Association, because we know that farms will have to continue to innovate and evolve to make sure that they can be financially sustainable. Um, so just be sure to check in with what your local zoning is, and if you need help in navigating that, please reach out to us. We have a tourism team at MSU Extension that can help, and we have someone that really specializes in working with local zoning and navigating agricultural issues. I know this is all about direct sales, but I wanted to bring in this concept of intermediate markets. This is really one step removed from direct to consumer sales, but I think it's an important part of the conversation too. There are ways to sell directly within this category too. What I mean by intermediated markets, is that there's one other entity between you and the consumer. A great example of this would be a locally owned grocery store where you're selling directly to the grocery store and then they're putting it on the shelf for the customers to buy. Another example would be selling to a food hub. A food hub is a type of business in Michigan and other places too, but where they're specifically buying from local farms and local food producers and distributing to local businesses. So for example, in one of the areas where I work in Kalamazoo, there's a food hub called Valley Hub, and they buy from local farms, and then they sell it to local schools. So they're that one step removed as well. Farms can also sell directly to local schools, and then it would go into their food service program. There's some different variations on this as well. So this is getting more into that wholesale territory. So we're talking about larger volumes of high quality produce or other items. It's important to have these skills for crop planning and post harvest handling. And in particular, when we're getting into those markets, they're often looking for a little bit more consistency in the post harvest practices and food safety, which we'll get into a little bit. But things like wholesale grading and packaging standards, so they're expecting to get something similar to what they would get by ordering through a wholesaler or a distributor. So having some familiarity with those grading and packaging standards is really important when entering into this market. The customer service here is still super important. Although you're not interacting with the end user that's consuming the product, you're collaborating with a local business that's going to supply that product to the consumer. It's really important to have reliable production, strong communication skills with that buyer, being able to let them know what you have available, how you can have them order that from you and really building that relationship over time to have sustained sales over time. This is a good way to move a lot of product if you can establish that relationship and if they can learn to trust you as a supplier. You'll also likely need to do delivery for this type of market channel. So that's a consideration. Do you have a vehicle that you can use for deliveries? Are you able to have that vehicle be refrigerated? If you have items that need to be refrigerated, that's what I mean by maintaining the cold chain. So keeping things cool from your farm to where it's going. You need to think about things like delivery routes if you have multiple customers, and then ways to communicate anytime there's any issue or a change to the order. Oftentimes, when you're selling into these larger markets, they're looking for some food safety certification or at least an assurance that you have a food safety program in place and have done some training of your staff and things like that. Thinking about well, first of all, do they require some type of food safety certification? If so, how do you get that and are you able to get that for your farm? And then how are you going to communicate your food safety practices to the customer if they're looking for something specific in that area? Then do you need help with farm food safety? We have a really awesome on farm food safety program in Michigan that can get you set up with all kinds of resources. That group is called Michigan Produce Safety, and I'm happy to connect anyone that's interested in that. Hey, Mariel? Yeah. Clare had a question in the chat. She asked, are there crops or products that cannot be sold to food hubs, such as eggs, dehydrated products, et cetera Great question. It depends on the food hub and what kind of licensing they have. You would need to check with them. But yeah, I think the limit is endless depending on what that particular business has decided they want to carry. If you need help connecting to food hubs in Michigan, I'd be glad to get in touch with you after this presentation as well. We have them not all over the state, but we have several in the state, so I can connect with you and let you know which ones might be in your area. Yeah, the couple of different options we'll talk about today are farm to institution and food hubs, and then there's lots of other options here too, but we don't have that much time. We'll just go through a couple of these so that we have plenty of time for questions. The farm to institution is what we call, it's our fancy term for selling to any place in Michigan or beyond that has a cafeteria or some food service program where they're serving a lot of meals every day. These are things like schools, early care and education sites, which are like daycares and preschools, colleges, hospitals, even some employers have cafeterias for their staff and things like that. There's opportunities here to either sell directly to those places or to work with a food hub or a distributor to get your product into these places. We have some awesome incentive programs for schools right now. In Michigan, we have something called the $0.10 a meal program, which provides funding for schools to purchase fruits, vegetables, and dried beans from Michigan so basically schools are getting supplemental funding if they are buying local foods. The other piece is the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement. You'll sometimes hear that's called LFA. $0.10 a meal is a state funded program. LFA is a federally funded program, and that is providing money to schools to buy not just produce, but also other things like meat, milk, eggs, other agricultural products. These are huge because schools often have a limited budget for buying food, but they're able to purchase more local food thanks to these incentive programs. We also have lots of farm to institution resources for both institutions but farmers as well through these websites, the Michigan Farm to Institution Network and Michigan Farm to School. If this is a market channel you're interested in, definitely check out these websites. There's also lots of events that happen throughout the year, so we'll keep you informed about those if you sign up for newsletters. Then just briefly on food hubs, what they are. Basically, food hubs are a way to aggregate, distribute, and market food from local and regional producers and either distribute that directly to consumers or to wholesale buyers. I'll show a couple of examples. Farm Link is in West Michigan and there's a setup that basically is a software program that they've utilized where farms can list what they have available. And then the customers can buy it, and then the farm delivers it to FarmLink and then the customer picks up from FarmLink or they deliver. So they are serving both individual consumers and wholesale accounts, so you can see that there's different sizing, for beets, for example, down here, you can either buy a 20 pound quantity or you can buy two pound quantity. You can see if you're a restaurant, you'll probably get the 20 pound. If you're an individual, you go for a three pound. Everybody is shopping that same website for the quantity of food that they need. Here's an example in Flint Fresh Food Hub. They're doing a lot of CSA type food box programs. They're buying from local farms, they're selling directly to customers, and they also have capabilities to do chopping of food, so they can sell apple slices or carrot sticks or things like that. And so does Valley Hub, which is in Kalamazoo. They also have capability to do chopped products. So they're primarily servicing, like school food service and restaurants. So they'll do like five pound bags of diced carrots, for example. And those will all be coming from local farms. So just a last list of some additional markets to consider. Again, we don't have time to go into all of these other immediate intermediated markets, but farm stops are getting more popular. Michigan is a consignment based grocery store model. So an example would be Argus Farm Stop. If you want to check them out, local grocers, restaurants, catering programs, and also food access programs and emergency food. So places like food pantries, food banks, they often have a budget. They're a great source to donate, but they often have a budget to buy some local food as well. I don't know where you are. Oops, my Siri is talking to me. Sorry about that. We also have a great bulletin as part of our beginning Farmer demand series that gets into a lot of the details of these different markets. Be sure to check that out if you're interested in learning more. I'm going to open it up for Q&A. I see that we've got some awesome links in the chat from them. Thanks for posting all those resources. When we post the recordings of this to the website, we also include the resources and the links. Be sure to check that out. If you don't have a chance to look at all these today, it'll get posted with the recording too. I'm also going to go to the next slide, we're still doing Q&A. But you have my email address if you want to reach out and get connected about any of this. Yeah, I'd love to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you, everybody, for your attention today and thank you, Mariel. We got a comment in the chat that Chris enjoyed it and appreciated it. Thanks for engaging, Chris. I appreciate that feedback. I'm glad it was useful. Yeah, I thought it's a great overview of things to consider. It's really nice to have those in mind before you start off on a venture. Dan's given you some love too Mariel. Said very good presentation. Yeah. Yeah, I think it is definitely something to consider as you're beginning, but also you can always change your strategy throughout if something's not working for you. It's good to think about these different opportunities and the opportunities themselves change over time too. We saw during the pandemic, a lot of people had to shift really quickly into online sales or delivery and things like that. Always opportunities to be making changes and updating your marketing strategy. Awesome. It's awesome all those tools are available now too. Thank you.