Direct marketing might seem tough to achieve for an arable business, but two farmers at the BASE-UK Conference explained how they’re using it to deliver results. CPM reports from the event.
“I can honestly say social media has saved my business from bankruptcy.” DAVID WHEATLEY
By Mike Abram
In 2019, a fire on David Wheatley’s Cambridgeshire farm destroyed virtually everything. While insured, he struggled to put the business back on an even keel, racking up £270,000 worth of losses during the next three years.
“I was this close to bankruptcy,” he told the BASE-UK Conference. “By my figures, I had to earn £22,000 a month for the next two years to stop the bank pulling the plug.”
A traditional 180ha fenland farm growing winter wheat, potatoes, sugar beet and oilseed rape, he also had 12ha of ‘commercially unviable’ orchard, just under 1ha of reject Christmas trees, and 3ha of peonies.
“Traditional farming wasn’t going to fix my problems,” he said. But a perhaps unlikely combination of a love of peonies and a hate-to-love relationship with social media has…
“I hate talking to people at the best of times and I hate posting online, but I can honestly say social media has saved my business from bankruptcy.”
He said it started with the peonies. Having grown them for 25 years, he found a niche on social media teaching people how to grow them, building an audience on channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok, and ultimately selling a ‘Very Important Peony Lover’ subscription package.
“Selling peonies is easy; last year I sold my whole peony crop for three times more money than what the supermarkets would have paid me. And then I sold 20% of this year’s upfront in the form of subscriptions, nearly 12 months before I’d even grown the flowers.
“This gave me positive cash flow and the confidence to not sell to supermarkets, meaning I can control the price of all of my peonies.”
While he’s extended the period he can sell peony flowers from two to six weeks by growing eight different varieties, selling peony tubers means he has customers all year round. He used a free ‘idiots guide’ to growing peonies as a sales lead to create interest in buying the tubers.
With that experience, David has extended his social media sales to other crops on the farm. Apples from a low yielding 100-year-old orchard were sold for £1/apple once David had posted that he couldn’t sell them as organic because the cost of certification was too high. “I sold 12ha worth in two weeks.”
Bought for £250/t, he sold 26t of his neighbour’s ungraded potatoes at £25/kg plus £10 postage and packaging in three weeks, while he’s now selling wheat in 9kg bags for £12. “That works out at £1333/t. We’ve sold 10t already.”
GRASPING OPPORTUNITIES
Wheat flour was next after buying a flour mill partly funded by his local council through a small business grant. “Within 48 hours of picking it up, I had flour, bran and wheat on my website selling for £2000/t. My biggest problem is that it sells out so quickly.”
Having made this leap, he said he isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. “I can’t see much future in the traditional side of farming. Cut out the middleman – which sometimes can be as much as 60% of the income – and the future looks good,” he commented.
Like David, Lancashire farmer Martin Caunce has also developed a profitable business selling direct to the general public, mostly through his online farm shop. In an area renowned for vegetable production, especially lettuce, Martin stopped growing or even renting out ground for those crops on his 54ha, recognising that commodity production was unlikely to continue to be profitable without serious investment.
CREATIVE USES
Looking for alternative crops, the turning point was when he was approached to supply wheat for heat packs. “Ironically, we weren’t growing wheat at the time,” he recalled.
Having telephoned his neighbours, he wasn’t able to find anyone who was willing to clean the small quantity of wheat required, even when offered double the commodity price, so he started to grow wheat on his poorer land.
That enterprise expanded into growing wheat for wheatgrass seed. “We quickly found that customers preferred heritage wheat. At one point we were growing it in polytunnels and selling 600 trays a week, until recession killed the market overnight,” he told the conference.
By then he was selling through his online shop, set up in the late 1990s. “It was easy at the time as there wasn’t Amazon.”
He said one important decision was to change the name of the business from P Caunce & Son. “This didn’t tell anybody what we did, so we changed to Brow Farm. As soon as people know you’re a farm, they want to deal with you. Nobody wants to deal with a supermarket, they’d rather come direct to the farm,” he said.
According to Martin, speaking directly to customers has helped to understand what they’re looking for – so a regenerative approach soon followed because his customers preferred him to not apply pesticides, which has also helped address severe soil erosion problems caused by vegetable production.
“However, I didn’t get into regenerative because it was better for the farm; I did it because it was better for my pocket. The lowest price we take for wheat now is £660/t,” he concluded.
This article was taken from the latest issue of CPM. Read the article in full here.
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