Selling Your Products

The resources below offer guidance and ideas for marketing and selling your products.

Note: This list primarily includes resources for farm product marketing that apply to diverse regions and types of produce. We strongly encourage you to look for resources specific to your local context or product of choice.

BeginningFarmers.org:

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.

USDA New Farmers:

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.

Cornell Small Farms Program Resources:

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.

Sustainable Agriculture and Resource Education Marketing Strategies for Farmers and Ranchers:

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 Carrot Project:

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.

USDA Regional Food Business Centers Program:

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.

Buyer Engagement:

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.

Building an Online Presence for Your Business:

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.

GAP Certification Overview:

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.

The Kitchen Door:

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.

ATTRA Resources:

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

Farm Commons:

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.

New Entry Sustainable Farming Project:

This project offers regular online farmer training, including courses such as Farm Business Planning, Wholesale and Institutional Markets, and Explore Farming. New Entry’s website also features a farmer resource library, searchable by a variety of topics: marketing, business planning, recordkeeping and financial planning, farmers markets, food safety, and more! New Entry’s YouTube channel offers a great opportunity to explore many of the topics above and includes workshop recordings and playlists.

Wholesale Readiness Training:

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.

Selling Local Foods to Schools: A Resource for Producers:

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.

Community Supported Agriculture:

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.

Specialty Crops Competitiveness Initiative:

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.

Video: Having Multiple Distribution Channels to Reach Customers:

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 postharvest handling, tools of the trade, and running a farm stand.

Transfarmation:

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.

CSA Innovation Network:

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.

Food Loss and Waste:

This USDA web page 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.

Value-Added Products: Mushroom-Based Value-Added Products: 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 to use 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.

Iowa Cottage Food and Home Processing Licensing Information:
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.

Webinar: A Sample of Cottage Food Laws from Around the Region
This webinar recording presented by Food and Farm Policy Affinity Group covers the cottage food laws of the heartland region, which includes Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and northwestern Arkansas. The webinar provides a comparison of regional cottage food laws, advocating state policy change and compliance through education. It concludes with a question and answer session.
Market Analyses: These reports outline the process of contacting prospective buyers, discuss the sectors surveyed and the responses by sector, and list products of interest in each region for future consideration: Central North Carolina, Greater Des Moines, Greater Louisville, and Northwest Arkansas.

Specialty Crops Terminal Markets Standard Reports: 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.

Business Planning: Agricultural Tax Training: 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.

Farm Credit University: 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.

NxLeveL® for Agriculture Entrepreneurs: 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 Farm Labor Dashboard: 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.

Selling in Online Marketplaces: “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.

ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture Program Newsletter “Tips for Selling on the Internet”

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.
Setting the Right Prices for Your Products: University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Guide to Pricing: Long but thorough, this guide provides detailed pricing strategies and information on how to conduct a cost-sensitivity analysis.

Beginning Farmers Guide to Pricing: This conversational article gives insight into the key questions one should consider when setting product prices.

Penn State Extension Pricing Strategy Guide: This article offers tips on presenting prices so they seem more like a deal for customers.