awesome, I didn't expect so many replies so soon
we have a pretty decent sized small farm 30 acres, mostly wooded. We are "new" in that our entire farm is only a few years old and we haven't had any product yet since all of our products are long term things such as blueberries, cherries, goldenseal etc...
we too are looking at value added products, my winter project is to rebuild an old homestead on the property into a really fancy cannery, north carolina is really awesome with their cottage industry laws so we are able to do this on the cheap without a huge investment in equipment.
Our ESTIMATED blueberry harvest when mature should be somewhere from 5-20 tons and our cherry harvest will be from 5-10 tons... I guess, I should say 0 tons at the low end since we all know things can happen. With this large of a harvest and since we're operating somewhere between a monoculture and a permaculture we're mostly looking for lower dividend wholesale markets, but with the value added products we can have a little more time and breathing room to market those direct market or at the very least directly to retailers. We're thinking of jams, spreads and juice concentrates right now, but we try to remain flexible and open minded as to our products. We do have wholesalers lined up and chomping at the bit though, so that's a good thing for us.
Right now aside from equipment (into which I group most tangible items) our only real off farm inputs are sulphur and lime. I can't see an easy way to get away from this, and don't really care to either.
Our cherry orchard is the main point for this discussion, after seeing some videos posted on here about a permaculture orchard and since the cherries are not in the ground yet (this will be happening spring of 2015) I was curious to see what type of marketing models other folks have to see if it is something that I am interested in pursuing. The orchard space will not be large by "real farm" standards, so that is why I'm still on the
fence about getting too diverse in there. My big fear is going through all the effort and expense AND TIME to grow these things and then end up with amounts that are too large for us to use, yet too small for us to attract buyers for.
We are going to pursue direct marketing with a cautious approach, the wholesalers will take all that we have any time we have it provided we have enough to make it worthwhile and I don't want to leave that security behind, but the higher profit margins are tempting. Some of our products will be direct marketed alongside our wholesale approach, the shelf stable items for example such as the goldenseal or "jam" that we produce would be ideal for this.
We have some things going for us and others that are not... As per the forestry comment, that would be awesome, but in our area there is no desire for veneer since no one produces it here, most of our wood is bought by log yards in bulk and the prices are shockingly low, they hit 8 dollars a ton this summer. Anyhow, 30 acres is no where near enough to be considered a harvestable forest
We are however 2 hours from 4 major cities, one of which is asheville n.c. and has a very high population of alternative living folks. I'm sure properly marketed wholesome products can find a home there and 2 hours isn't too far to drive provided we have a vehicle that doesn't take a fortune in fuel to do so...
We have other sources of on farm income that are in the works, but they do not fall into the scope of this post, so I'll leave them out. anyhow, we are still firmly "in the red" in regards to the farm, but I don't think it'll be over 5 more years until we start seeing some income, in the meantime we have other projects in various stages that can still be re-designed and that is the purpose of my asking these questions.
I am very envious of the poster with the nice animal operation, that is really awesome to have your off-farm input so low for a large animal farm. We all know animals take space, I'm afraid purchasing more land just isn't really feasible for us right now but I do like hearing about other successful operations and how they are run.
Adam, while we are within 2 hours of 4 major cities, I have to admit I'm afraid to go too small on things. No one around here is going to pay for produce, if it isn't for sale in the store, then it had better be cheaper than the store. maybe the thinking on that will change, but for now that is the general consensus here. I could market specific things to restaurants, but they require more of an assurance of product delivery and quality than I can provide for them at this point. If we could grow "just the right amount" whatever that is, we could open up some direct to consumer things in the surrounding farmers markets (each of which would be 2 hours at least). Our local farmers market is ok for garden size products, but a hundred bucks worth of sales in a day is unheard of there so going with several bushels of anything would only accomplish leaving those things out in the sun for the day haha... how far do you travel for your markets? it seems like aside from our 2 large products, we have quite a bit that is similar. I wish we had more folks around here that would appreciate a better product, but we live in an area where Kraft macaroni and cheese is considered a vegetable... Don't get me wrong, we do have a very open minded smaller community directly around us, and I think our smaller very diverse garden can generate some income through our local farmers markets but to generate the kind of income that we want I'm still of the mind that our larger crops are the way to go for us with the ability to turn it all into a value added product in the event of wholesaler shenanigans...
our medicinals are one thing that we can certainly go extraordinarily diverse with and that we plan to do, since the profit margins are exponentially higher with rare
medicinal herbs as opposed to produce, in my opinion we can afford to have smaller more diverse harvests and since we're not having to worry about spoilage with them, we do not have to worry about how quickly they sell... I guess that is another concern for me regarding our fruit operation, is that if we are too diverse and we cannot sell our stuff quickly enough, then we are sort of stuck... I'm hoping our organic low sugar value added products will find a market though and if that is the case, then my concerns would be invalid at that point
thank you for the wonderful replies so far!