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The farm-customer connection
If your customers are interested in organics, they want something more than the non-organic market offers. Market segments may include:
Consumers:
• Food-culture types who thrive on local crops with great taste
• Wholesale buyers who are just filling an order
• Social activists looking to build healthier communities
• Health enthusiasts who will ask more questions as time goes on
• New parents who want the very best for their children
Processors and others:
• Entrepreneurs seeking quality ingredients for their products
• Other certified organic farmers who need your products for their own operations
Retailers:
• Health-food stores where customers value a regional farm identity
• Restaurants moving into organic and place-identified foods
• Regional chains of grocery stores
As you get to know your customers and what motivates them, you can highlight the attributes of your products that most appeal to them. Learn what new areas they are interested in that you can develop together. Show them your farm, your people and your products to achieve the kind of relationship that public-relations dollars can never buy.
Organic certification may give you a label, but it's up to you to back it up by being the kind of farmer your customer wants to do business with. The more you can wear the marketing hat as well as the farming hat, the better you will succeed. The better we can document and communicate the quality of our farm's soil, water, crops, meat, fiber or products, the more confident we can be in saying that we have something distinctly different to bring to the marketplace.
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 When the Marcheses purchased Emery's blueberry farm and converted it to organic, they kept the name in honor of the original owner, who "had a reputation for being the first person to hook a wagon on a tractor and bring people out to his fields." (Photo: TRI)
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