Grounded Values in a Shifting Economy
April 24th, 2023
[Read Time: 10 minutes]
This piece was written in collaboration with Farm Business Advisor and co-owner of Sun Tracker Farm, Carine Hines. Carine started her journey with Kitchen Table Advisors as a client in 2019, working alongside her husband Robert as a farmer growing annual fruits and vegetables based on organic and regenerative practices. Carine’s heritage in farming, passion for plants, and commitment to creating a more environmentally sustainable and socially just food system are what inspire her to be a farmer and Farm Business Advisor with KTA, a position she started in January 2023.
As a complement to the following feature, we invite you to dig into our piece released last fall, “Navigating the Current Economy as a Small Producer” for greater context on the economic situation many of our client farmers and ranchers are facing.
Guiding-Star Principles
One of the most common questions that KTA farmer and rancher clients want to explore with their business advisors is how to price their products or services. However, there is not one formula that farmers use to determine price. Rather, they consider several factors including their cost of production, the quality and uniqueness of their product or service, and what they believe their customers are willing to pay. To make matters more complicated, over the last year, the price of everything needed to farm rose significantly: seeds, compost, gas and electricity, packaging, insurance, labor, and more. These higher farm expenses meant that farmers also had to raise the price of their goods and services. For small sustainable farmers and ranchers in particular, this sometimes led to their prices being questioned, compared, and criticized. But what separates these producers and their products from those you might see at the grocery store, and what ultimately guides their businesses and the decisions they make, is their personal values and commitments.
All of the producers that KTA supports are guided by their own sets of values, values that are fundamental to their businesses and hold true regardless of economic circumstance – something that is not always clear to customers. By committing to their values, farmers and ranchers may choose to not use certain pesticides and chemical fertilizers, or only feed their animals grass, or practice cover-cropping or other ecologically-led practices. Many of these values are common among small sustainable farmers and ranchers, but each person has their own unique guiding-star principles that underlie each business decision. When challenges or uncertainties emerge, farmers’ values rise to the surface, allowing them to find a path forward. Ultimately, these values form the foundation of each farm, affecting their practices, their product, and, most relevant to customers, the cost of their products or services.
At the farmers market or through their CSA subscription, people may only see that the cost of a farm’s products or services, like everything, has risen. But there’s an opportunity for us to go deeper. Through the following three client stories, we explore the values of the farmers, how they shaped their businesses based on these principles, and what this means for the pricing of their products and services.
Monica, Midsummer Flowers LLC
Monica Drazba of Midsummer Flowers LLC discovered her love of farming in her backyard growing vegetables and flowers. As she planted and tended her own garden, she began to understand and cultivate her passion for local agriculture, even traveling as far as Fiji to manage a vegetable garden outreach program so families could grow their own fresh, seasonal produce. Now, in managing her own budding farm business, Monica continues to connect with her community around what it means to produce things locally and sustainably.
Monica’s fresh flowers are grown in Vacaville using regenerative practices – such as using ground cloth to conserve water, applying compost, integrating cover crops, and growing pollinator-friendly plants – that improve soil health and increase biodiversity. As a flower farmer and florist who designs arrangements, Monica knew from the beginning that she did not want to supplement her own product with flowers grown from other parts of the country or world. Instead, she creates bouquets and arrangements by harvesting blooms grown from her farm and adding stems from other local growers when her crops are impacted by weather. In prioritizing local, seasonal flowers, Monica hopes to underscore the importance of developing regional agriculture systems that nurture small economies and produce lower carbon footprints.
Ecological responsibility and local agriculture represent the values behind Monica’s farm, but the larger agricultural system often makes decisions based on these values harder. When Monica started her business, she was faced with higher start-up costs. Regenerative practices tend to incur higher costs and are more difficult to implement than conventional ones – obstacles that were challenging for Monica to overcome as a first-generation farmer. Even now, paying the high cost of production supplies and soil amendments is a decision where she continually reaffirms caring for natural ecosystems.
Monica’s values similarly affect how her business shows up within retail spaces. With the higher costs that go into producing sustainably grown and local flowers, Monica’s arrangements are often priced differently than other flowers at grocery stores, farmers markets, or in the floral design space. At first glance, these higher prices can be dismissed by customers. But Monica stands by her prices, knowing they reflect her values while allowing her to make a living. She found that standardizing a price for mixed bouquets works best, creating flower combinations throughout the season that account for a per-stem cost. Drawing upon wholesale prices as well as conversations with other local growers, Monica decides her pricing by accounting for the cost to grow each plant and incorporating local sales tax, wages for herself and her employee, and the general operating costs of her business.
As she continues to develop her business, Monica actively invites conversation about her farm with the community at the Vacaville farmers market, and by sharing her vision for increasing biodiversity and planting more perennial species with interested floral design customers. Though her operation is small, she hopes these conversations can seed greater transparency and underscore the importance of local, sustainable agriculture in creating a livable environment for future generations.
Christian and Shannon, Perennial Grazing
Together, Christian Cain and Shannon Waldron run Perennial Grazing, a regenerative custom grazing business in Northern California. Along with their 1,000+ sheep and five dogs, Christian and Shannon spend most of their time traveling around Northern California to provide grazing services within vineyards, orchards, parks, and other landscapes. They intentionally designed their business such that their care for the land and deep commitment to cooperation and symbiosis are an inherent part of their service. Their motto, “Better Together,” not only guides their relationship, but also their business – by providing ecological grazing services that improve soil health, tend to cover crops, and mitigate fire danger, Shannon and Christian allow the natural relationships between animals, plants, and landscapes to flourish with mutually beneficial results.
Instead of strictly cultivating the land, Shannon and Christian follow its guidance, honoring and listening to the ancient dynamics in the ground itself. This can mean they face a variety of unique obstacles. They graze rocky hillsides, trudge through flooded pastures, and drive long distances between customers with sheep in tow. Balancing the well-being of the land and their animals with the wants and needs of their clients provides an additional challenge. Nevertheless, they embrace these and other challenges readily to honor their commitment to nurturing the symbiotic relationship between their animals and the land.
Regenerative custom grazing as a service is one that not many consumers have heard of or used before. As such, Christian and Shannon try to educate and set realistic expectations for what their services can yield, how they can work towards landowners’ goals, and what these services will cost. Pricing in particular is an evolving part of Perennial Grazing’s business; after a few years in operation, Christian and Shannon realized that they could not provide a flat rate to all customers when the land they graze varies greatly. Thus, they altered their pricing system to include both a flat rate as well as fees that accounted for areas of additional difficulty – long driveways, difficult terrain, nowhere to unload and reload animals, and more. Regardless, Perennial Grazing always gives a complete price breakdown to their customers to provide full transparency and understanding.
Christian and Shannon are also attentive to collaborating with their customers before grazing begins to ensure they are aligned on the outcomes of the service. This is especially important as sometimes clients can have conflicting needs. One customer, for example, wanted to graze for both fire safety and weed management. Shannon and Christian discussed the issue with the customer, explaining that in the long-term, grazing lightly would be more beneficial for soil health and encourage perennial plants to grow and outcompete annuals, all the while supporting a more fire-resilient landscape. Together, they were able to come to an agreement around realistic grazing outcomes.
Setting these expectations and tailoring their prices per parcel can run the risk that Perennial Grazing will lose customers who do not want to pay more than a flat rate. However, Christian and Shannon know their cost structure and business model allows them to not only serve their customers, but also follow their values. In providing this unique, ecologically-driven grazing service, Shannon and Christian embed their values of symbiosis into the very foundation of their business, allowing them to provide a vital environmental service, nourish the land and their animals, educate their community, and make a living for themselves.
Hope and Shayne, Fiery Ginger Farm & Spork Food Hub
Before they started their farm, Fiery Ginger Farm co-owners Hope Sippola and Shayne Zurilgen both worked with kids – Shayne as a middle school science teacher, and Hope in a kids’ gardening program. Neither of them grew up with an awareness of agriculture, and, back then, they never envisioned they would become farmers. Now, they run Fiery Ginger Farm, a mixed-vegetable urban farm in West Sacramento selling their produce to the community. In addition to farming, Hope and Shayne also provide educational tours to the public, directly support school gardens, and operate Spork Food Hub to supply surrounding schools with farm fresh produce. To Hope and Shayne, their farm business is an asset to their community, providing food, knowledge, understanding, transparency, and connection.
From the beginning, Hope and Shayne farmed using regenerative, soil-healthy practices, enriching the land they cultivated while producing nutrient-dense food for their community. They initially sold their produce through several different outlets: farmers markets, restaurants, and CSAs. Eventually, they realized their real interest lay in providing fresh, healthy produce to local schools for students’ lunches.
Selling wholesale, especially to schools, posed several challenges – Hope and Shayne had to figure out what to grow in a cost and time efficient manner, how to price their product, and to whom to sell. Integrating wholesale into their business meant selling at a lower price, which could only work if Hope and Shayne successfully grew a few crops efficiently. In addition, schools needed a larger quantity of produce than Hope and Shayne had previously produced on their small plot of land.
Instead of forcing more out of the soil, Hope and Shayne started experimenting with different crops to figure out what would yield the lowest production costs while maintaining their sustainable growing practices. They were able to figure out a few key vegetables their farm could grow, and that schools were interested in buying. Over time, their commitment to soil enrichment through crop rotation and cover cropping allowed their farm to yield more abundant and nutrient dense crops. They also started building relationships with schools in their area, first by helping support school gardens and then hosting field trips for kids to visit their urban farm. The process was gradual, but ultimately Hope and Shayne found several values-aligned schools willing to experiment with Fiery Ginger’s offerings and, in time, purchase a majority of their produce.
As they cultivated relationships with schools and districts, they discovered an opportunity to scale up by collaborating with other regional farmers and local schools. Funded by grants from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), Hope and Shayne created Spork Food Hub, working alongside 30 local farms to supply nutrient dense, sustainably-grown produce to over a dozen school districts, universities, restaurants, food security programs, hospitals, and other institutions. The food hub significantly expanded what Hope and Shayne were able to sell to schools, both in quantity and type of produce, meaning more farm fresh vegetables were making their way into school lunches. Furthermore, it provided a unique opportunity for other regional, sustainable farmers to sell through a new market channel without the barriers to entry that Hope and Shayne faced.
Hope and Shayne knew from the start that selling to schools would be more difficult, but feeding kids was one of their core values around farming. They worked through multiple business plans, strategies, and partnerships in order to find the right solution for them and Fiery Ginger Farm, affirming their commitment to sustainable agriculture and farm-to-school education for their community.
Supporting a Reimagined Food System
What is most evident from Monica, Christian, Shannon, Hope, and Shayne’s stories is that they farm for their deep passion and commitment to preserving land and soil, caring for the climate, and sustaining a local agricultural system for their communities. Everything these farmers do, from planting cover crops to tending sheep on steep mountainsides, is with the deliberate intention to stay true to their principles of sustainable agriculture while providing for their customers and maintaining their livelihoods.
The price of their products, though higher, reflect the care that went into every aspect of their business. When you buy from these small, sustainable farmers and ranchers, you are supporting the viability of their businesses while also honoring the values that they nurture. Many of these values may be close to your own heart – the desire to protect Earth’s natural resources, a thriving, local agricultural system, land and animal ecology, children’s health and education. Knowing your values and learning those of the farmers and ranchers who nourish us represents an opportunity for connection and community building. By doing so, we can not only understand what goes into the prices of their products and services but also engage more deeply in creating a reimagined food system together.
How to Show Your Support
If you’re wondering where to go from here, we’d recommend checking out our Love Local Guide to explore how you can directly connect with the values and businesses of KTA client farmers and ranchers.
PC: Monica Drazba, Perennial Grazing, Paige Green