 Hi, I'm Norman Gregg, we're at the Gregg Farm in Red Hook, New York. We're located about 100 miles north of New York City in Hudson Valley. The farm is 550 acres and it's a fruit and dairy farm. We've changed crops over the years, but it started just with apples, strawberries, and crops for the cows. And as we found that we wanted to go more retail, we've created a retail season. So now we have asparagus, strawberries and peas in June, July, we go into blueberries and summer raspberries and then fall raspberries starting in August with apples, blackberries, pumpkins, and then Christmas trees at the end of the season. I've always thought of the New York City market as our local market. And the way that people happen to come is that instead of advertising to the world, we target local newspapers. The Upper East Side of New York City has its own newspaper and the Greenwich Village has its own newspaper and Brooklyn Heights has its own newspaper. So we target neighborhoods that we think would have the disposable income to have automobiles to travel for a weekend or a day off. And we advertise classified ads in those local papers because if you try to do a radio or television for Metropolitan New York City, it's prohibitively expensive. But if you can target those as your local market, it's possible. My family has been in the pick your own business since 1949. It started as a gleaning process after we've harvested for wholesale on a small acreage of strawberries. In the 60s, we had a write up in the New York Times and we were picked out every day and so we decided that should never happen again. We added another 15 acres of strawberries that next year and now we need a write up in the New York Times every year to pick the crop. But it's interesting how the markets changed over the years. In the 50s, everyone came in a station wagon with four or five children and mother and father and they would wait all year for the three weeks that strawberries were ready and pick 100 pounds of strawberries per car and take them home and spend a day freezing and jamming and that doesn't happen anymore. The market today, the public comes a single head of household, maybe with one child or a young couple out for a day in the country and they'll pick eight or 10 pounds of berries and not know what they're going to do with them all. But then they will stop at the farm market and pick up a jar of jelly or a shortcake and heavy cream to go with it. But the trend in the industry is that the pick per customer has gone down. The trend on our farm is that we're harvesting now the same number of pounds, total number of pounds of berries each year, but to three times as many customers. We have more and more people that come from a greater distance and stay for a longer period of time and so we tried to create a broader point of interest for them. So we have a small petting area, we have a picnic area, we have a place where they can feed the fish, besides a place where they can cut their own flowers or visit our nursery or visit our market and bakery or stop and see the dairy cows. So we try to become a destination agriculture rather than just a pick your own place. One of the interesting but difficult aspects about pick your own is if you have a field of produce, it's really like stocking the shells in a store. And you have to have inventory on the store shelf for the public to come. So you're constantly dealing with the shelf life of the product on the plant. Crop like apples sometimes you have a two week window to pick the apples even though the flavor may be perfect on a smaller window than that. But it's a job always to match the public attendance and pick vis-a-vis what you have in the crop and there are a lot of ways to manage that. One is to target your advertising. If I see I'm going to have a hot week and I'm right at just about before peak in strawberry, I know I have to advertise heavily that week to get the public to come. The other way to do it is not to do any advertising, let the people come when they want to and then pick what they don't pick and send that to market or sell at retail at your farm stand. I'm a dairy farmer and I've been taking care of animals for years and when we started having public come to the farm, the only way that I could think about it as a farmer was now we just have another kind of animal on the farm. And so when I think of pick your own, there's a part of this that is just grazing and it's not very different than your dairy pasture. The area closest to where the public comes in gets grazed very heavily and the area at the far end doesn't get grazed at all. So if you can constantly control where the entrance to the pasture is, then you can pick all the crop. When people come to pick your own at the farm, where they park their car is very important. You can walk a little bit to the crop, but Americans don't like to walk and if they pick much crop, they really don't want to walk carrying what they picked back to their car. So the length of row we've gotten so we never planned anything that's more than 280 feet long and preferably with parking at both ends of that. Information is key even in the farming business, especially in pick your own and how you communicate with your customers is something that has to be done very efficiently. We used to do mailings for each crop and then we did quarterly newsletters and now we collect email addresses and by doing that it's much less expensive for us as the farmer and the information is much better because we can send weekly email bulletins for free. Farming has to work not only for your customers, but it has to work for the farmer as well and you have to decide what it is you want out of farming. For me, once we went to a situation where we're entirely open to the public, then it's easy to add other things that are public. At the Greg Farm, what we do new each year is what keeps it exciting for me as the farmer.