More Articles

Don’t Eat a Third Hand Tomato; Come to the Farmers’ Market

Farmer selling produce (tomatoes, beans, cabbage) at a Farmers' Market

Mastering Marketing - Special Edition 2020 STOP! Before you take another bite, you might want to consider that your food choices have a much bigger impact than you could ever imagine. Nothing beats the flavor of field-ripened Maryland tomatoes harvested at the height of their ruby blush. These...

How to accept SNAP/EBT and WIC payments as a farmer

How to accept SNAP/EBT and WIC Neith Little, UMD Extension, Urban Agriculture Extension Agent Acknowledgements: Thank you to Ginger Myers, Good Dog Farm, AgriHood Baltimore, Weida Stoecker (MDA), and others for talking with me about EBT and WIC. 4/22/2020 With increased direct-to-customer sales,...

Pick Me! Pick Me!

Mastering Marketing - May 2019 You have a quality product. You’ve identified your target customers and crafted your promotional materials for that audience. But, consumers have so many buying outlets and product options, how can you convince them to them to choose yours? It’s a crowded marketplace...

To Be or Not to Be a Farmers Market Vendor-Is That Your Question?

Mastering Marketing - January 2019 My apologies to William Shakespeare for mangling the opening phrase of a soliloquy spoken by Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play by the same name. But, as producers start drawing up their marketing plans for 2019, market vendors are questioning whether sales from...

Packaging That Sells

Mastering Marketing - July 2018 Packaging is more than just a way to get your product from A to B — it’s also an incredibly valuable customer touchpoint. In today’s age of “Social Media” moments and You Tube videos, your product packaging is an additional way to get extra marketing mileage for your...

2018 Consumer Survey - Your help is Needed!

Mastering Marketing - Special Edition June 2018 Across much of the United States, farmers markets have reported a decrease in consumer participation over the last couple of years, resulting in a decrease in farm sales and income. In an attempt to understand and reverse this slump, a multi-state...

Emerging Models for Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

Business planning - graph and marketing plan

Mastering Marketing - June 2018 “You never change things by fighting an existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller I ran across this quote in my morning reading just before going into a meeting with some of the University of...

Market Season-Ready, Set, Sell

Customer purchasing an apple at a Farmers Market

Mastering Marketing - April 2018 Despite the colder temps and slow start to the growing season, farmers markets, roadside stands and on-farm markets, need to get ready for sunnier days and the first flush of customers looking for fresh local produce, fruits, and other locally produced foods. How...

Target Marketing to Customers - The View from the Other Side

Mastering Marketing - March 2018 In his book The Practice of Management , Peter Drucker declares the only one valid definition of a business’ purpose is to create a customer… Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions:...

Food Preferences and Purchasing Trends─Getting Out Ahead of the Curve

Mastering Marketing - June 2017 During a recent webinar that I led addressing vending at Farmers’ Markets, a participant asked how to discover food trends and consumer purchasing preferences. While we discussed several resources for searching out “what’s hot and what’s not”, the real key to keeping...

Results of First Local Food Marketing Practices Survey Released

Mastering Marketing - January 2017 Just before Christmas, the USDA released the results of its first Local Food Marketing Practices Survey. The survey asked about the marketing of food directly from farm producers directly to consumers, retailers, institutions, and a variety of local food...

A Look at 2016 Local and National Land Values

Photo by Edwin Remsberg Each year USDA’s National Ag Statistics Service (NASS) surveys farms to get land value information on cropland and pastureland. The annual survey takes into account an estimated value of all land and buildings. NASS compares the survey results to the previous year’s results...

Digital Direct Marketing Tips for 2016 - Make It a Great Sales Year

MASTERING MARKETING - JANUARY 2016 Whether you’re selling raw or value-added farm products, breeding stock, agritourism experiences, or business services, the start of a new year is a good time to develop your digital marketing “action tools”. There’s lots of buzz words or phrases surrounding...

What is the Hubbub about Food Hubs?

Photo by Edwin Remsberg What is a food hub? In general, food hubs help farmers get their products from the field to the consumer. According to USDA’s definition, a regional food hub is “ a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution and marketing of source-...

When Can You Call a Product "Local"

Photo by Edwin Remsberg We have all seen products advertised as locally grown or locally raised at farmers markets and on menus of all manner of restaurants. But when can the term local be used, and what does it mean? Is a Delaware watermelon local or must a product advertised in Maryland as...

Ignite Your Sales with Sensory Branding

Ag Marketing - News Update Product Positioning and Branding Sell, sell, sell! That’s the end goal of your marketing efforts. But getting your product into the customer’s cart is seldom a direct line from locating the product to purchasing it. That’s where promotion enters the marketing equation...

Direct Marketing Do’s and Don’ts — the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ag Marketing News Update With the direct marketing season in full swing, it’s a good time to step back and examine some of the tools and marketing technics that can have a substantial impact on your success as a direct marketer. Whether the outlet is a farmers’ market, your on-farm stand, or...

Is the Price Right?

Ag Marketing News Update Whether you’re gearing up to sell at a farmers’ market, through your roadside stand, or by private treaty, you cannot thrive in business today without a pricing strategy. The price you set for your product must fall between two points: what the customer is willing to pay...

Search form

You are here

Learn