Selling Your Products

This extensive website covers marketing strategies; finding farmers markets, grocery stores, and restaurants; marketing organic products; selling at farmers markets; software to manage farm sales and invoices; delivery and transport companies; setting up internet marketing and sales operations; and more.

This USDA site provides resources for farmers entering a new agricultural practice, including grants, directories of potential buyers and marketplaces, and local and organic food promotion programs.

The USDA has created this specialty-crop resource hub with an interactive directory to assist specialty-crop producers, handlers, processors, retailers, and international traders in finding help when they need it. The directory is categorized and searchable by agency, program or service, and business type. It can also be printed as a PDF.

Offered by the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, the University of Minnesota Extension, and Renewing the Countryside, this free training is for produce farmers considering starting or expanding wholesale sales to schools, restaurants, grocery stores, distributors, food hubs, and other buyers. The recorded sessions, resource materials, and worksheets cover business planning and marketing mix, scaling up production, connecting with buyers, on-farm produce safety, licensing and regulations, pack standards and packaging, farm financial management, and nutrient management.

This 20-page bulletin presents many alternatives to marketing commodities through conventional channels. It spotlights innovative SARE-funded research into a range of marketing options, including farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, tourism, direct marketing, season extension, value-added goods, sales to restaurants, public campaigns, and the internet.

The Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas program website shares resources and guidance on business and marketing, farm start-ups, and local food systems.

This guide covers the importance of obtaining Good Agricultural Practices certification, preparing for an audit, and the resources available that can help with the process.

Working directly with farmers pursuing farm transitions, such as converting a poultry or hog barn into a greenhouse or specialty-mushroom operation, enables Transfarmation™ to publish a growing list of resources on their “Farmer Resources” page including conversion plans, crop guides and enterprise budgets, and business resources.

The UMass Extension Vegetable Program offers an overview of standard operating procedures (SOPs). It includes the importance of SOPs for food safety, tasks they are suitable for, characteristics of good SOPs, and templates.

This four-page document goes through basic considerations for farmers as they begin reaching out to potential buyers. It includes types of businesses, talking points, and questions to ask and provides a few helpful tips and resources.

CSA programs are models in which consumers subscribe to receive regular shares of the harvest of a farm or group of farms. This resource covers payment options for CSA shares, as well as considerations for operating, marketing, distributing, and retaining customers using a CSA model.

This USDA program provides regional support for small-to-midsize producers to access local and regional supply chains, with a focus on underserved farmers and food businesses. Centers’ responsibilities include acting as regional food hubs to coordinate across geographic areas, providing technical assistance for food and farm businesses, and building capacity through business-builder subawards focused on emerging regional needs.

The program offers a downloadable specialty-mushroom harvest-to-market guide and a video series detailing farmers’ experiences on a two-person vegetable CSA, a 400-share vegetable CSA, and selling produce to Headwater Food Hub.

The CSA Innovation Network is a great resource for determining whether community-supported agriculture (CSA) is the right fit for your farm. Learn tips and tricks for growing a CSA program and retaining CSA members. The CSA Innovation Network offers video courses, live webinars, discussion boards, and more.

This resource created by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service explores four pathways for producers to partner with nearby schools or districts: selling directly to schools, selling to intermediated markets that provide food to schools, working with the USDA Department of Defense Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, and becoming a USDA food vendor. It also explains how to make the connection when marketing to schools, how schools buy food, and what role producers can play in educating students about the food system and nutrition.

This video features Lida Farm, a vegetable operation managing multiple distribution channels to find a home for whatever they grow. The farm’s distribution channels comprise a community-supported agriculture program, farmers market, and farm stand, as well as wholesale distribution through a food co-op. The video covers post-harvest handling, tools of the trade, and running a farm stand.

This USDA webpage considers the many ways to help reduce unharvested-crop waste, feed people, and put money in farmers’ pockets. It overviews on-farm storage, value-added products, secondary markets, donations, and more.

Penn State Extension Article “Marketing Your Agritourism Business”

Foodborne illness is a public health problem that is largely preventable. This website surveys the rules and programs implemented to focus the nation’s food-safety system on prevention.

These local food marketers offer free downloadable resources to support food and farm business owners in their marketing efforts.

This resource covers the benefits of having an online presence and offers guidance on determining which platforms make the most sense for your business, maintaining your online presence, and optimizing user experience of your content.

“Selling Real Farm Products in a Virtual Marketplace” by Erica Frenay

“7 SEO Tips for Agricultural Businesses” by Laura Sutherly: This Agtivation blog post helps with search engine optimization (SEO) so your farm web page appears at the top of Google search results.

Digital Marketer offers free educational resources for online business marketing.

Hubspot Academy provides free online how-to lessons for starting marketing and creating successful Instagram, Facebook, video, e-commerce, and inbound-marketing strategies.

Community Alliance with Family Farmers The Farmers’ Marketing and Sales Notebook and CSA and Online Sales Resources for Farmers (California-based)

The Small Farm Tech Hub at Community Alliance with Family Farmers developed a resource to help guide farmers in determining whether e-commerce is a good fit for their businesses.

USDA Market News publishes wholesale market reports on specialty crops from selected U.S. cities’ terminal markets. The report categories are fruit, vegetables, onions and potatoes, herbs, tropicals, Asian vegetables, and nuts. Prices are determined by growing origin, variety, size, package, and grade.

Long but thorough, this guide provides detailed pricing strategies and information on how to conduct a cost-sensitivity analysis.

This conversational article gives insight into the key questions one should consider when setting product prices.

This article offers tips on presenting prices so they seem more like a deal for customers.

USDA Market News publishes reports with current prices for various crops.

These slides discuss why mushroom-based value-added products are increasingly popular and how they are showing up in the marketplace. They look at a few product categories that you may want to consider for your own business. For each category, we’ll provide an overview of the market; recommendations for which species may be useful for each product; information on the general production process, supplies needed, and packaging for retail; the per-ounce retail averages as of July 2023; and a range for potential profit margin. If you would like to access the presentation coupled with audio, please email [email protected], or click here for the accompanying transcript.

The Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals, & Licensing (DIAL) regulates cottage foods. This document covers the state’s definition of cottage foods and labeling requirements, as well as sales and licensing considerations, and includes DIAL’s contact information.

Looking to take your value-added production to the next level but not sure how to access a commercial kitchen? This searchable website can help you find licensed commercial kitchens for rent by city or zip code.

This organization offers a menu of support to help farmers build financial resilience. They provide value-added production webinars to support farmers looking to diversify their farm and profit potential. Priority is given to businesses in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and offers free or subsidized support for those states. The program is open to farm businesses from outside states when space is available.

This website provides legal workshops, a farm law library, and free resources for farmers. Topics include forming an LLC, farm business structures, and types of farm insurance.

The University of Arkansas School of Law developed these materials to help small farms with income-tax and asset-protection issues. The training consists of five lessons—filing, records, tax, entities, and agricultural income—and each lesson plan includes an evaluation tool to help farmers identify which topics are recommended to meet their needs.

This university offers producer academy courses, which include Ag Biz Basics, Ag Biz Planner, and Farm Business Transition Workbook. These online courses are designed with farmer and rancher students in mind.

This course focuses on how to start agricultural ventures that are not tied to large-scale commodity-style production. Course materials are designed for pursuing innovative ideas and enhanced marketing opportunities in agriculture.

The University of Vermont Extension created this dashboard of resources, which includes a labor readiness assessment, a purposeful-recordkeeping video for tracking labor on a diversified vegetable farm, an equipment cost recovery tool, and the Developing a Values-Based Vision for Your Farm workbook.

The Center for Arkansas Farms and Food recorded this video on small-farm taxes, covering filing requirements, recordkeeping requirements, and when to file.

The Farm Aid Hotline Team has compiled resource guides for several important topics that they hear about from farmers again and again, including legal assistance. The Legal Assistance and Education guide distinguishes legal assistance from legal education and lists national, regional, and state-specific organizations that offer one or both types of support.

This is a self-paced online course for farmers interested in learning how to use farm financials to explore their farm-business decisions. The organic course option uses a case study of a small vegetable farm. This course helps farmers evaluate their finances, take the pulse of their farm businesses, and set goals for the future of their operations. The course fee is $299, and participants are able to meet with the instructor for a financial review at any time during the course.