Raising Farm Prices & Finding Financial Freedom
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we sit down with Jessica Evans of Evans Family Farm from North Carolina. As one of Barn2Door Farm Advisors, Jessica shares her tips to pricing and packaging, why Farmers shouldn't be afraid to charge a premium for their products, and why financial health is key to a successful Farm business.
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Rachele Neal: Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rachele, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our farm advisors, Jessica Evans from Evans Family Farm. Welcome Jessica.
[00:00:39] Jessica Evans: Thanks for having me on.
[00:00:41] Rachele Neal: So it's actually been a long time since we've had you on the Direct Farm Podcast. And so to get started, can you tell us a little bit about your farm and how you started over in North Carolina?
[00:00:50] Jessica Evans: Sure. So we are in central North Carolina. We're a pasture based livestock farm. We raise meat for direct sales. We've been doing that since 2016, which is when [00:01:00] we started our farm. Neither of my husband and I have a background in agriculture at all. It was just spreaded from a passion of healthy food and healthy environment. And then "Maybe we'll raise a little bit more to offset the cost of raising our own." And it just snowballed from there. And so now we manage 110 acres here in Central North Carolina.
[00:01:17] Rachele Neal: That's amazing. And you guys started over in California, right? And then of migrated to North Carolina?
[00:01:22] Jessica Evans: We did. We had your backyard homestead in Southern California where we're from originally. Which was about two acres, which in southern California is a lot of land. It sounds like nothing in comparison to what we have now. But it doesn't have to raise, food for ourselves. And you know, t hat's where we started, some of our enterprises.
[00:01:38] Rachele Neal: So it seems obviously it's changed a lot over the last couple years. Can you really dive into the details since you've gone full-time farming and really have expanded what that's been like, and maybe some of the challenges you guys have faced.
[00:01:50] Jessica Evans: Yeah, absolutely. So there's definitely challenges with growth. We started on 10 acres and that was more than enough to start with. And as we added enterprise and as we [00:02:00] scaled up those various enterprises, we were just in need of more space. Especially if we, we would call ourselves a regenerative farm.
[00:02:07] So that means you can't overuse your land. So if we stock too many animals on it or cause too much disturbance, we're not really living up to one of those missions. And so we were leasing land on different farms, once that animal's here, a set of animals there and it was, it, you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes.
[00:02:23] And then the horseshoe of land around us that used to be all part of one contiguous farm became available and we'd have our eyes on it forever because it was beautiful land. We loved it. It's adjoining land, so as far as management is way easier. And that, had its own challenges and, buying land is a, it's not a small endeavor.
[00:02:41] Took time and, there's challenges in getting financing for farm land and interest rates and, all kinds of things like that. We actually use some of the U S D A programs, so if anybody listening has questions about using those new and beginning farmer programs, you can reach out to me. That's a whole nother conversation. It's a process, but it's worth it in my opinion.
[00:02:59] [00:03:00] No, that's really good to hear. I know we get a lot of questions regarding how to go about
[00:03:03] Rachele Neal: purchasing land or should I lease, should I purchase?
[00:03:06] Not to jump too far down the rabbit hole, but what went into your decision deciding to purchase over lease?
[00:03:11] Jessica Evans: Leasing this land wasn't an option, so. Okay. The owner, the owner wanted to sell it. He did not want the lease. He made it very clear. But he also worked with us, some of this land is owner financed cuz we are really, we're the ideal buyer for this land.
[00:03:25] Yeah. And so we worked different equations. And really it was a numbers game. I sat down with my accounting and ran my numbers and, what is, what are my payments gonna be? What is that gonna cost me? What are we making, what does this land let us scale up, in profitability?
[00:03:38] Can it pay for itself basically was the biggest question. And is it a good investment? I would say. Especially in this current climate, land is always a good investment. They're not making more of it.
[00:03:46] So the communities near us are growing and land is becoming harder and harder to find. So it felt like it was a good investment. So even if, heaven forbid, that we had to shut down the farm for whatever reason, does this land still have value to us? So all those things we [00:04:00] considered.
[00:04:00] No, that's really good to hear. And then in what point in your
[00:04:03] Rachele Neal: decision were you guys selling direct to market the entire time when you had the 10 acres? Or when did you make that decision to go direct to market or at least to get your business online and sell online?
[00:04:13] Jessica Evans: Yeah, we'd always been direct to market. And so we were doing that, just farmer's markets and word of mouth for probably the first year or so. And then we definitely just saw that was, so 2017, 2018, huge pivot to a lot of online sales, websites and we saw it was a necessity. Like we need an online presence, we need an online store, more than just our social media for marketing.
[00:04:35] And so I was starting to research, okay, how do I build an online store? All these different platforms that you can finagle yourself and none of it was really meant for farmers. So it was always like having to do all these weird workarounds.
[00:04:46] And happened to meet some of your founders at a conference when they were the ones running the booth. So we go way back. And I was like, perfect. This is exactly what I'm looking for. The best use of my time isn't learning how to build a webpage to meet my needs, so [00:05:00] let's go. So it was worked hand in hand that way.
[00:05:02] I know, I love to hear that. Especially over the last couple
[00:05:04] Rachele Neal: years, there has been obviously a huge shift to, to go online, but like you said, finding that tool that's specifically built for farmers' needs. Cuz I think there was a quote from another one of our farm advisors. He was like, I dunno how to build a website, but I know how to raise my chickens and grow the food and everything else. And so that's, it's huge and it probably saves you a whole bunch of time.
[00:05:25] Yeah, I mean it would take me eight hours to do,
[00:05:28] Jessica Evans: it takes me five minutes on the right platform. So
[00:05:30] Rachele Neal: And I'm sure you don't have that kinda time to spare.
[00:05:32] Jessica Evans: Ain't nobody got time for that.
[00:05:34] Rachele Neal: So something that we really wanted to discuss with you today, and something that I think a lot of farmers have a hard time deciding is the prices of their products. And so I would love to hear, when you first started farming, how did you go about determining your prices and how has this evolved and changed over time?
[00:05:50] Jessica Evans: Absolutely. I think when we first started, which I think is probably where every farm starts, you look around you like what's farmer Joe down the street selling chicken for and what's beef [00:06:00] for going here?
[00:06:01] And I don't know. I have to be in that ballpark if I wanna sell anything. And I think as we've grown and evolved and have learned. Every year I try and take some kind of online course or conference or professional development in that field, whether it's technical stuff in the field or if it's marketing and business stuff.
[00:06:15] And definitely learned that like my price point is my price point. Like it has to cover my expenses. And as soon as you stop, I think in farming, especially cuz we're producing some's food and, competing with the grocery store, sometimes we feel like we're competing with the grocery store, which really we're not.
[00:06:31] Like it's apples and oranges. . And I need to be unapologetic about needing to make a living. And I'm not trying to price gouge anybody. I'm simply trying to get paid for what I do. And no other profession feels guilty about that. Like farming, farming and teaching, which I was a former teacher, so maybe that's where it comes from. It's like deep seated, right? To not get paid for how much you work. So just learning, having to have a good grasp on numbers. I think that's, also part of this discussion, which takes time. And I would say sit down from the very, very [00:07:00] beginning.
[00:07:00] In North Carolina they have a farm school for people interested in getting into the business of farming. For people that don't wanna jump right in there, but one of those courses is business. Somehow through networking, I had met the guy who teaches that business section and we were able to trade kind of data for the spreadsheets.
[00:07:16] And he wants to know if his spreadsheets work, do they work in a real world environment? So we'll sit down and put my numbers in there and figure out what are we thinking of, what are we not thinking about? What are we not taking into account? And I use those constantly when I'm playing around with something.
[00:07:28] So playing around with like feed prices this year okay, how much are they going up? How much does that change? My pricing. And to be able to having a spreadsheet, I can plug those numbers in and see what my cost is. So I generally, as a rule of thumb, I'm like to two x my cost , if it costs me, $3 to grow a chicken . Yeah. I wanna price that at $6 for that chicken. Per pound, I should say, not the whole chicken. I'm not Walmart.
[00:07:53] Rachele Neal: Exactly. You make a really good point when it comes to, so you're looking at your input costs and you're seeing how you can, you're [00:08:00] double your profit off of what your costs are.
[00:08:02] But you also touched on a good point really quickly that I wanna cover is with inflation and increased feed costs and some of those input costs I imagine have been going up with the recent climate. So how have you been accounting for that and raising your prices or have you been raising your prices to account for those costs?
[00:08:18] Jessica Evans: We did, so we did raise our price on everything but poultry honestly by about 10%. Now, poultry is tricky. For anyone listening who does pastured poultry, you are, it's the public perception that chicken is the cheap meat. Now granted I think our product is completely different. Science would back up our product is completely different than what you buy at the grocery store, but you're still dealing with a customer's perception. And so we were able to scale a few things on our poultry side that let us get our costs lower. Cuz that's one way to, make more money isn't always to make more sales, but how do I lower my cost?
[00:08:52] And so we were able to compensate for that, by scaling things in a certain way. Like economies of scale, it was, we started doing bigger batches on our processing days, so we're [00:09:00] dividing, that processing labor by a larger amount of birds.
[00:09:02] Things like that so storage, pricing our bags that we vacuum, seal and pricing our stickers differently. Doing a couple value adds on items that weren't selling that we could price up. So we did, raise on a couple things like boneless skinless breasts. We could sell that all day. I probably could charge $25 a pound, but I don't need to.
[00:09:18] Yeah.
[00:09:19] That one went up. That usually goes up about a dollar a pound per year just to stay current in the market. But everything else, we went up across the board about 10 to 15% on all our cuts. Pork, beef and then turkeys for like holiday turkeys, those went up too. Okay. Cause that was just a cost, where we couldn't, there weren't enough wiggle room to eat that cost.
[00:09:35] Rachele Neal: And then how does, like your branding and how you communicate the quality of your products do you use that at all in order to communicate to your customers of why you're raising prices or how does that play a role?
[00:09:45] Jessica Evans: I think we did a general email beginning of the year just saying, "Hey, just note a couple things may be going up."
[00:09:52] Actually, I don't know if I did. I think I thought about that. And I think just reading the current climate, it was just expected. Everything was going up. When [00:10:00] prices changed and then spring, our market, our in face market starts out again. People just kinda expected it. Like we just didn't really get a lot of pushback. Because everybody was experiencing that, grocery store prices are up, gas prices are up, and then just if we did ever get a customer questioning, " oh, this used to be this much," and " yeah, expenses are up, fuels up, feeds up," and it's nothing they haven't heard before.
[00:10:20] So it was never really any pushback. Now there was like a kind of an influx in, anybody who sells meat direct, knows how easy it was to do in 2020. In 2021, in 2022, it's gotten a little back to challenging, that customer retention, has been the goal. Rather than necessarily like getting more customers.
[00:10:38] So the people that tried it, and then went back to grocery store stuff. We're trying to keep them back along our side of things, I guess I would say.
[00:10:45] Rachele Neal: That makes sense. Do you use subscriptions to help with customer retention?
[00:10:48] Jessica Evans: We do. Our subscription program I love it, so I wouldn't change it for the world. And it's flexible too. So again, we understand the current climate for other people as well. So we let people, there's no commitment is what we do. You can [00:11:00] cancel, you can pause anytime, which I think people appreciate. And I don't take it personally when they do, most of the time they're like, "Hey, I got too much of my freezer."
[00:11:06] "Hey, we can't afford it right now." I've gotten those emails throughout this year and that's totally fine. " Hey, I understand. No problem. You. I can cancel it for you or here's the easy way to do it. Jump back on whenever you're ready," kind of thing. People appreciate that too.
[00:11:19] So I think that is also good customer relations, like being understanding and nobody's bound, into this, where they feel like, "oh, I gotta, I keep getting them." But we do keep marketing 'em for sure. And people love it. I have people that have been doing some of the commercial, not to name names, the commercial subscription boxes that are very ambiguous about their sourcing of meat.
[00:11:37] Yes.
[00:11:37] And pricing in general. They have a flat price, but you're not getting, you don't know per pound price. You don't know where that animal came from. And just educating our customers of " Hey, here's exactly where it comes from. Here's about what you've got. You can opt out of a certain kind of meat." We let a couple customers, flip flop things if they ever need to. But yeah, it's a, it's a guaranteed sell and I value those customers. So I think that's been a big thing in retaining our subscription [00:12:00] customers.
[00:12:00] I wanna keep those subscription customers cause that's a guaranteed sale. Like no work on my part. Every single month, they get a hundred to 200 dollars worth of meat. And so when we get like the prime cuts back, we get ribeyes back or filets or something we've been out of stock on, they get it first.
[00:12:14] They wanna feel special and valuable, so we definitely wanna honor that for them.
[00:12:19] Rachele Neal: Yeah. You touched on a good point and
[00:12:20] Barn2Door actually just wrote a blog on that topic of how local farms can compete with some of those big meat box delivery and subscription programs. And I think you touched on a really good point of that local farms can compete because of customer relations, convenience with subscriptions, and I know you, Evan's Farm does delivery too. And so finding those unique nuances of how you can offer high quality products, transparency, everything else in the same convenient formats, that's, I'm sure that's been huge for you guys too.
[00:12:49] Jessica Evans: Yep. Yeah, convenience is still key. As much as our customers may value what we sell they still want it to show up magically on their doorstep. They don't wanna go anywhere. They don't wanna do anything, so they still want that same experience. While [00:13:00] getting what we would. Push is a higher value, product.
[00:13:03] Rachele Neal: And I'm sure they're more than willing to switch over to you guys after being with another subscription box company after understanding how much better your products are.
[00:13:11] Jessica Evans: Yeah. We had a couple converts this weekend. We had a big, our big fall like on farm event, so farm tours and food and kind of a grand opening for our store. And we had a couple customers be like, "Yeah, I've been getting not to name names, the commercial subscription box, "But now I see like I've seen your animals, I've set foot on here. I'm going to switch over, what can I do?"
[00:13:28] Rachele Neal: That's so great. I love to hear that. Cuz again, I feel like when you have that awareness for your customers and you're able to show them that you're offering higher quality products with the same conveniences, like you said, they're more than willing to convert and they would rather support a local producer than not knowing where their food is coming from.
[00:13:46] Jessica Evans: Absolutely. I think most customers would definitely would rather support, the local economy or the local farmer. It's just making it convenient and easy.
[00:13:53] Rachele Neal: And accessible. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to pricing. So when. We talked about knowing like your input [00:14:00] costs and understanding your business numbers, but can you maybe dive into more of, you've talked about the spreadsheet tracking and everything else.
[00:14:07] What other tools do you use in that process to understand your input costs versus your output costs, et cetera?
[00:14:12] Jessica Evans: Yeah, so I sit down with those kind of once a year, but it's definitely something that should be visited more often than that. So I've even sat down or made a couple calls to our CPA this year, who does our taxes to be like, "Hey, can we quarterly just make a s tanding appointment let's put all this data in the spreadsheet. Am I staying on track?" Cause right now, all I have time to do is in the off season, which is winter, year's almost up, and then be like, "oh crap, we overspent here, we underspent here."
[00:14:35] Or we're way over budget. So I want to sit down again with my cpa. It's one of those , "what's the best use of my time?" , I'm not an accountant, I don't wanna be an accountant. I think numbers are interesting. Great. That's as far as it goes for me. So somebody that can be like, "Hey, here's my books, here's my QuickBooks file," which I keep up to date, so that I can just send that information off, because she doesn't know what all our vendors are for, what products we get from what person and where that falls in different categories.
[00:14:57] Cuz I do want things categorized. I wanna [00:15:00] know, maybe an enterprise is really draining and it's not holding its weight. Maybe that's something I consider dropping, or that I really need to reevaluate how we're doing it. So I do have plans this coming year to sit down quarterly with my CPA and go over those during the year so we can make those adjustments before the end of the year.
[00:15:16] So I would say yeah, finding a good cpa. Hands down, best money will ever spend. When we were like a sole proprietorship, I could do my own taxes. It's pretty easy. Once we became an LLC and our other business as a corporation, that is way out of my game.
[00:15:28] Rachele Neal: Right. And laws and taxes and all those things are changing constantly. So to be a full-time farmer, full-time business owner, and then also to keep track of that's impossible.
[00:15:38] Jessica Evans: Yeah, it is and not how I wanna spend my time.
[00:15:40] Rachele Neal: Barn2Door does have an integration with QuickBooks? So how does that play into your processes?
[00:15:43] Jessica Evans: Yeah, I mean it's super easy cuz our, really our Barn2Door is like a single input, it's all sales product income.
[00:15:49] So it's easy to synchronize that. It's already into my QuickBooks. I don't have to go, synchronize it with my bank and my credit card. That would be another tool if you've never used QuickBooks, I love QuickBooks, I know there's 10,000 other accounting [00:16:00] softwares. But I think it's really easy.
[00:16:01] It integrates with a lot of different things cuz it's really popular and doing an online basics course of how to put those things in. How to add categories, doing it one time makes it super simple for the rest of your business. Would definitely be like a huge point of advice.
[00:16:15] Numbers are scary and intimidating, but you need to know them because losing your business is also scary.
[00:16:20] Rachele Neal: Yes. Yeah. Or having an audit and not being prepared, I think that's a big nightmare that we hear about.
[00:16:25] Jessica Evans: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We had a payroll audit this year and I was like, ask my accountant what did we do wrong?
[00:16:29] She's said "Nothing, you just like randomly got drawn, you did everything right. Just send her your paperwork and you're okay." I'm like, okay, sweet.
[00:16:35] Rachele Neal: And you were prepared it sounds like all the ducks were in a row and it was easy just to send it off.
[00:16:40] Jessica Evans: Yes. Yeah.
[00:16:41] Rachele Neal: That's awesome. Like you said, having those tools in place, having the people surround you, like CPAs, having that peace of mind is huge for your business.
[00:16:50] Jessica Evans: It's not cheap, it's an expense, but I think it's well worth the money to have a handle on things and to make those, financially informed decisions. Not just " Hey, I like pigs, let's do [00:17:00] more pigs." Are pigs making me money?
[00:17:02] Rachele Neal: Exactly. That's where it comes down to the bottom line for sure. And Barn2Door, we launched recently our finance course with a QuickBooks certified pro-advisor. So I think that's a good way for farmers if they're looking to get started with QuickBooks and the Barn2Door integration.
[00:17:16] So what would be your advice to other farmers for determining the price of their products? I would also love to know how does the way you package your products, determine your prices. So like with your subscriptions and your boxes, et cetera.
[00:17:30] Jessica Evans: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great point to hit on that I didn't kind of finish that thought when I started saying that we started pricing then on what our cost is. And our cost puts us, in my opinion, in a premium product category and I wanna premium price. I work really hard for my product, so I wanna make money, a decent money on it.
[00:17:46] And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And so not just pricing accordingly, but I need to also make sure my product looks, taste, feels, like what I'm charging for it. That if I do a giant, $75 Tomahawk [00:18:00] ribeye for Father's Day. That better be a dang good steak.
[00:18:02] Or nobody's gonna buy it. It can't be freeze or burnt. Packaging's gotta be good, the flavor's gonna be great. Even the labeling, it's gotta look like a premium product. Paying the little extra, does it cost me 3 cents a label if I order, 5,000 labels to stick on my packages?
[00:18:15] Cuz you can, look at your state's regulations. You can put additional labeling most of the time on the meat you get back from the processor. I'm not covering up their label, so everything's still there, but just a branded sticker so that package looks pretty, it looks cool, it looks like it's worth what I'm charging for it.
[00:18:29] And, again, deliveries like I do those in insulated tote bags. They're a cost for us. We reuse 'em. We tell customers to leave 'em out. We'll pick 'em up. I get 50% of 'em back probably. But again, it's, it's got a nice pocket for a folder receipt. It's got a brand on it, it's delivered, dropped right to the door, the neighbors see it. Again, it's that perceived value as well. So it needs to appear like it is the premium product it is as well.
[00:18:51] So I think that is really important in your pricing. When you wanna charge a premium, it's going that little extra step, with the stickers, with the clean papers, with the, insulated bags or whatever [00:19:00] fits the model that you're doing.
[00:19:01] Rachele Neal: Yeah, absolutely. And you touched on so many great points there.
[00:19:04] I think one of the biggest things is just those branding opportunities to tap your brand into your packaging with your labels, and I love that idea of having those tote bags with your brand name on there and just the brand awareness alone that the neighbors are gonna see and be jealous of " oh, what did they get over there on their doorstep?"
[00:19:20] And to increase that brand awareness locally among the neighbors is huge. I know we hear a lot of farmers picking up more customers and neighborhoods that way.
[00:19:27] Jessica Evans: Yeah, and we'll do like special commercial weekends at our in-person farmer's market. Oh, free tote when you spend $30.
[00:19:32] Which is not that much, it's not crazy. But then we see our insulated totes all year long walking around the market with our name on 'em too. It costs me maybe $3 a bag, but that marketing is free, so.
[00:19:42] Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think farmers too are
[00:19:45] Rachele Neal: sometimes afraid to charge those extra premium prices, cuz they want their products to be accessible to everyone. So what advice would you say to those farmers who are afraid to maybe charge some of those higher prices?
[00:19:55] Jessica Evans: You gotta look at who your market is, who are you marketing to? Who's your ideal [00:20:00] customer? And that's a whole nother like marketing thing, sit down, and if you were to paint a picture of that person, that one single person who's your ideal customer, what is he or she look like? What do they do for a living? What do they do in their spare time? Just have that person in mind. And every time you're writing something, writing a recipe, a blog, an email, like you're writing it to that one person. And it's okay not to be everybody's product, you know and that's fine. That's totally fine. And sometimes you might be that person's holiday product. We sell a lot of Thanksgiving turkeys to customers who don't buy from us year round. So just believing in the value of what you're selling as well, and that you don't have to be competing with every single person, around the corner or the backyard person who's got, free dozens of eggs all the time.
[00:20:40] That's my competition, those people giving stuff away. But yeah, I can't do anything about that. Yeah, controlling what you can control and really, marketing to who your ideal customer is and catering to them in all the things that you do. And that's gonna draw more of that ideal customer, to your door.
[00:20:54] Rachele Neal: Yeah, absolutely. And then what are ways in which you're consistently engaging your customers too, if they aren't subscribed to any of [00:21:00] your products, but what are ways you try to get them to keep coming back to you.
[00:21:02] Jessica Evans: Emails for sure. So I'm a firm believer in email marketing. I love our Mailchimp integration because the order reminders, that takes me three minutes cuz they're limited in characters. I'm not adding graphics I don't feel like I've gotta make it a pretty newsletter, but, guaranteed makes me a couple hundred bucks every week just by sending those email reminders out because sometimes they're ordering stuff that's, I'm not even putting in the reminder.
[00:21:22] It's just " oh, Evan's, oh, I forgot to order my eggs this week." Or, "oh, I forgot I gotta put my deposit on my Turkey." It's just a way to continually engaging with that customer. So I'm a firm believer in email marketing. I even pay like my girl that does our farmer's market stand on Saturdays since we opened our in person store on farm I have not mastered the ability to be in two places at once. I stay most of the time in our on farm store. She does our in person market and I started paying her a dollar per email. So every time she collects an email in person, cause I wanna maintain that year round relationship even when our market isn't year round. I tell her like, "how many emails you get this week, how much you put in the system." Like I'll give her an extra, five, 10 bucks.
[00:21:58] That's awesome.
[00:21:59] That doesn't cost me [00:22:00] anything really. But that email marketing again, I think is the best way to personally communicate with your customer when you're not seeing 'em face to face.
[00:22:06] Rachele Neal: And if those five customers of those emails that were, that you paid $1 for each go and sign up for a subscription even. Think about all that recurring revenue you're just getting from that $1 email. So that's huge to have those incentives for employees.
[00:22:17] Jessica Evans: Yeah, like even if they like buy a dozen eggs each, like that's 25 bucks. So what's my roi? I spent five bucks. I got 25 bucks. Like it's pretty good.
[00:22:24] Rachele Neal: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's fabulous. I know we have the CFSA conference coming up in Durham, North Carolina.
[00:22:31] Yeah. And so excited to be in person again. I love my in person conferences.
[00:22:35] Yes. We are so excited too. So for our listeners who are not in the Carolinas, CFSA is the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, and Jessica Evans and Barn2Door are participating in this sustainable farming conference in Durham, North Carolina. And so this episode will actually debut after the conference has wrapped. But I know that you will be presenting not only alongside Barn2Door, but you have your own presentation. So I would love to hear [00:23:00] more about that.
[00:23:01] Jessica Evans: I do. So that's the former teacher in me. I love talking to groups of strangers. It's wonderful. My strand at the conference is actually on educational agritourism. So a couple years back we started a summer camp program for kids. And that's may not be everybody's cup of tea, but that's really what it's focused on, is not only agritourism, so being able to use your farm to create, tourism, dollar value and revenue, but the educational side of that too. That's what we're focused on. How to do either summer camps or just even weekend camps, afternoon camps, things like that to add again, value and revenue for what we're doing.
[00:23:31] Rachele Neal: I love to hear that. And then also just focus on like educating the future consumer too is huge and turning those into to consumers who are consuming locally produced products and supporting local businesses. That's awesome to hear that you guys are doing that. And how fun of a presentation.
[00:23:48] Jessica Evans: Yeah, it'll be really fun and we'll cover just a lot of things that come up when you start planning something big like that.
[00:23:52] And again, it's, for us, it's a marketing thing. So I love doing the summer camps cuz it's a heck of a lot of work for sure. It is profitable, but it also gets [00:24:00] people that maybe are in my surrounding community cuz people aren't gonna drive from two hours away to go to my summer camp. I think it's wonderful, but let's be real.
[00:24:07] And so it's drawing my local community, letting them put foot, on the farm. See, touch, feel, have that experience, and then it's not like an intimidating connection. Those are the people that come to our other events, the people that'll shop at our store. So it's also, it's a marketing strategy as well.
[00:24:21] Rachele Neal: And increasing that local brand awareness too. Like we talked about before, that's awesome. And then Barn2Door's presentation is on food scarcity and how local farms can be a solution. After the current climate of, our economy. And so I know you'll be participating in a panel discussion with us alongside two other Carolina farmers, so we're so excited to have you and to be with you there in person.
[00:24:41] Jessica Evans: Yeah, I'm excited about that too.
[00:24:43] Rachele Neal: So just to wrap things up here what's next at Evans Family Farm?
[00:24:46] Jessica Evans: All kinds of crazy as usual.
[00:24:48] So nothing terribly different probably for the coming year. We're, keep doing our summer camp programs. We actually have randomly gotten a lot of requests. It sounds weird, but for an adult like farm camp program. Whether it's like a day [00:25:00] program or a weekend program just learning on farm, on hand skills, whether it's poultry processing or grass management. And then, having the fun aspect in there too.
[00:25:09] It gives them that personal connection. Let's cook some food, let's have some craft beer, and let's hang out and meet people that are like-minded. So probably start doing a little more of that in this coming year for sure. And hopefully continue in what we're doing now, producing quality pasture raise meat.
[00:25:23] Rachele Neal: That sounds like very fun endeavor. I can't wait to hear how that goes and get a debrief on next time we have you on the podcast.
[00:25:29] I wanna extend my thanks to Jessica for joining us on this weeks podcast episode. Here at Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farms like Evan's Family Farm.
[00:25:40] We're honored to get the opportunity to learn from our most successful farms who share the tactics, resources, and tools they use to grow and manage their farm business.
[00:25:48] If you would like to connect with Jessica and other farm advisors, attend Barn2Door Connect, register for weekly sessions at barn2door.com/connect.
[00:25:57] And for more information on Evans Family Farm, you can [00:26:00] follow them on Instagram @evansfamilyfarmnc.
[00:26:03] Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time.