 Sarah is so special. It's a farmer directed grant arm from the USDA that started in 1988 with the Farm Bill because the USDA knew that farmers are always on the cutting edge to find applied solutions to their problems that they have. Lance Cray has 10 plus years of experience in farming, social enterprise and community development. He is currently the operations director of New City Neighbors, a non-profit that provides first time youth employment to 20 plus youth through a social enterprise. Three acre vegetable farm and a farm to table cafe that makes value added soups, salads and wood fired pizzas. All right, great. It's good to be with my people. My farmers are always my people. It doesn't matter if you're, yeah, y'all know what I mean. So I'll share a little bit about my Sarah project and then I'm going to just share a little bit about our farm and maybe some unique features of our CSA. So we have actually received three Sarah grants total as a farm. So we've done a youth educators Sarah grant. So if you're trying to educate other youths about what you're doing, it's a pretty easy application. We just submitted one two days ago. So you just missed that one, but you go for it next year. And then we've also done two Sarah farmer rancher grants. I think those are due in December. And so anytime I have a new idea on my farm, I apply for one of them because it's a decent amount of work, but when we built a pizza oven, we got a $7,500 grant to build a pizza oven. And then when we were doing intercropping and we thought that was unique, we got another grant to do that. And so it's a way to help pay yourself, try out a new idea. And I would just say the kind of the trick is I was just sharing with them. I think we're farmers and we don't really value our time very often. So we're like what I really need is somebody to pay for my pizza oven. So I'll show you the trick. That's what I needed. But the way I kind of tricked the system was I did a workshop on how to build a pizza oven on your farm. And then I post that and then we had other farmers come out and check that out. We did a YouTube video on it. And then we build our pizza oven. And then we had money to do that. But I asked for money to pay for my time to build a pizza oven. And for like time to travel to talk to you about how to build a pizza oven. And like time to build the video. Then I had $7,500 that was in the pot. And then that allowed me to pay for the material to do the pizza oven. So that's just kind of a way to work the system. And the Sarah people are nodding in affirmation. So I didn't do anything that sketchy. So yeah, that's kind of all I'll say on that. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about our CSA. I'm really grateful for that presentation. It's going to save me some time. And we're just kind of doing a 10-minute intro. And I like dialogue better. And y'all seem like that kind of group too. So we'll kind of get into it. So we're a nonprofit. So that's a little bit unique. We're in the city of Grand Rapids. So that's a little bit unique. We now have three growing sites. So we are growing in the city on about a third of an acre. And then we're growing outside of the city on about an acre and a half on one site and an acre and a half on another site. It was a really long story that I don't want to get into as to why that's the case. But we're about a 250-member CSA. We run it as a social enterprise. So we're trying to cover the majority of our costs so that we can do youth employment in the city. So we'll have 20 youth that will come and work on our farm or in our cafe. And then the farm revenue kind of helps pay for that. We gross about $140,000 a year through our CSA. And then we also have a pop-up cafe. So we recently purchased an old 1890s farmhouse and we renovated that, put a commercial kitchen in. I had to build another pizza oven because of a long story I don't want to get into. Basically, be careful if you work with churches because sometimes your values might change. And so then had to build a new pizza oven, a new pop-up cafe. And so now we have a new location. So that kind of goes over a lot of things. That's what I said. And that's our urban location. I'll just also say another kind of unique feature of our farm is we're working with low-income food access sites. So about 25% of our produce is going to them. And I'm talking tomorrow afternoon about kind of a farm to pantry CSA model that we've been piling for the last two years so you can kind of get in on that. We're also one of the first farms in the state of Michigan to be able to do EBT for our farm shares. So it was like food stamps. And then we do that with double up food bucks so that low-income customers can use their bridge card to buy a share at 50% off on a weekly basis. And Amanda over there is who you want to talk to if you want to do that. I just want to talk about this as a way to kind of maybe holding some ideas or concepts about how we're thinking about our CSA. So I listened to a farmer to farmer podcast. I don't know if people do that anymore. It was Chris Blanchard, but that was maybe three or four years ago. I felt like every farmer was listening to them when they were waiting. And I don't remember the farmer that did this podcast. So I'm supposed to give credit to somebody that I don't know to give credit for. But they talked about having these three C's that they were thinking about when they were thinking about their CSA. Y'all are not and you remember who it was? It was three. So I added two. So there's some originality here. But the first three was convenience, connection and cost. So y'all were just talking about connection the whole time. That's a really big one. And then I added choice and character. And I'm just going to kind of go through like how we kind of think about them on our farm. And that might be just like a helpful rubric for y'all to think about your particular context. Like how are you hitting on some of these concepts and then kind of connect it to your own particular environment. This is the first slide is just to talk about retention, which you already talked about. I feel like you don't need to think about this your first two or three years as a farm. Because you're just selling stuff to your friends mainly. Like your first year it's like the 25 people who know you. They're your friends and your family. And then it's like the next year it's like oh okay you didn't totally screw it up. They'll tell their friends and family like this is actually legit. You'll get to 50. You'll probably be okay to go up to 75. And then you're going to start having problems like year three or year four. If you don't have your retention rate you're going to start having problems because you got to find that many new people every single time. And so y'all are not in your habit. You get up to like 400 like y'all are we have 250 members. You can see those numbers at the bottom. If I have a 60 percent retention rate I got to find 90 new people every single year. And then you want to lower that number as much as possible because that's a lot of people to burn through on a yearly basis. And so then connection I'm not going to talk about very much at all about this because y'all basically just talked about it. But do everything that they just told you to do. If you're a farmer thinking about vegetables and you don't have time then trade a share with somebody who wants to do that. Or find somebody who wants to do that kind of work on your behalf. And then some other things like you pick we are in the city so we love doing you pick that's a great way to connect to your customer. Have a workday at your site that's another way to kind of connect to your customer. We're really big on our pick up say I'll show some some photos of that. Of where be present the whole time make sure that somebody really enjoys being there like if you're the tired farmer then you're just so tired you just weeded everything and whatever and you're cranky then find somebody who isn't cranky to connect with your customers like for real like you got to do that. And then a newsletter we used to do the weekly newsletter thing we don't do that anymore it took way too much time but if you how else are you connecting digitally. Do stuff in the off season like do an off season cooking class when you aren't super busy like in January like try to do a cooking class if you have a context for environment how can you upload as much of of that work in January and February so it takes care of itself throughout the season. And then we also are lucky in that we do have a commercial kitchen on site now and we have this pop-up cafe and then that is really replace a lot of the need to do any of those other things because people are eating pizza on our farm on a weekly basis so we're connecting and they're buying things and so that's really the ideal situation. I mean so these are just some photos of work days or you pick this is what the inside of this new farmhouse looks like and some of our youth employees who run that so obviously those three students are doing the connecting on our behalf so I don't I don't have to do that because I am a cranky farmer most of the time. And then that's just a picture of our new pizza ovens we if you go on the stairs site you can see how we built our first oven we we did need to build new ones and built a double oven because a pizza oven is a choke point and so we need we have making a hundred pizzas every single Thursday and we needed two ovens now to do that. And then we also have community events so this was a recent panel discussion that our youth staff led about racism and sexism in the food system and then we brought in all these speakers from the community to speak on that subject and so that's another way like dinners that chefs can do whatever it is that's getting people into your space. And so then convenience connection to me is like what CSAs do extremely well like I mean when you survey kind of product like that's like the bread and butter of CSA. Convenience I feel like is what CSAs do the worst but there's it's still really important so be cognizant of that and like try to figure out how you can address that but like we're not open 24-7 like a grocery store like we have very specific pickup times they're in conflict with people's work schedules like when you're asking people to sign up for a CSA you are a major inconvenience in their life like understand that and then try to mitigate that as much as possible because everybody wants things to be convenient so like don't get mad at that but try to figure out how to address that. One of the ways we address that we have a very long pickup time for CSA so we go from 12 to 630 it used to be from 12 to 6 and then a lot of our customers are we're upset because they're coming home from work and they're like you know there's traffic in the city like we can't get to your site on time so we had to bring it farther out to 630 that's a cost to us but it's a really important thing to consider so how else can you make your CSA convenient? We have this commercial kitchen now and so we have value-added soups now that we're making so our chef is making soups with whatever's in season that's become hugely popular to our CSA share customers they're on a Thursday picking up their vegetables they're not going to go home and make a meal from scratch and so like here's a jar of soup they feel really good about that and they can go home it's a ten dollars for a court jar they return the court jars it's a really nice looped system if you don't have a commercial kitchen there's a lot of other food entrepreneurs out there that would probably enjoy that market and so connect with them and figure out the logistics of like what's the local restaurant in town or who's a new up-and-coming food business so that you could offer that product to create more convenience for them make pick up a joy not a chore if this is the most inconvenient part of their week which it probably is it better be a fun part of their week like if you're asking me to do something inconvenient like make sure that like they are connecting with you you're sharing a story with them like they're laughing with the other shareholders that they're interacting with or it will just be an inconvenience online ordering like we used to try to save money i'm not having to pay square to do every single interaction and stuff like that like but make sure that purchasing is just easy the three percent that you have to pay square or whatever point of sale provider that you have is worth it it will make your system of signing people up easier we had to figure out csa for coven so we stumbled upon drive-thru pickup so the way we do this is we have a google form that goes out to our shareholders on tuesday it has what's available that week we offer choice to our customers which i'll talk about in a second but there's generally about five to six choices in that google form that they then select off of then just becomes like a thing that we print an excel sheet basically after we sort it cut it and slices put it on a brown paper bag and then basically that's how we box our share we put in a brown paper bag people drive through and then we give them the bag we had to do that all through coven to figure that out because we have a very market style pickup and now we have a hybrid style where we were having a in-person pickup that looks like a farmer's market or they can do the drive-thru thing and about half of our customers do drive-thru now and the other half want to have that face-to-face interaction want to go through the line and then people forget to fill out the form so then the other way is the way to kind of back that up and we also partner with the local bakery to sell baked goods that customers can purchase ahead in advance so like we don't even do all of that value added stuff in house and so you could figure out a way to do that this is just what our pickup looks like I'm baking that people eat with their eyes not with their mouse and so I'm a big big proponent of like your csa should have a lot of aesthetic to it so we like renovated this old coop building like hang up the lights make the board look really nice when you go to a farmer's market it looks like this all the time because all everybody knows when you're in that competitive environment if your your booth doesn't look good people aren't going to buy stuff but then you do your csa and it's just like a box on a like a table with no tablecloth on it and like in a parking lot and it's like like y'all like you know what this at the farmer's market like why are you treating your most valued customers poorly so I'm a big fan it should look good and then those are just the drive-through pickups in the back and then that's how they look and COVID they had to hold up a sign with their last name because we couldn't even like breathe on each other through a window or whatever and then costs so obviously we all are always thinking about costs all the time I think csa is actually the cheapest way to eat locals so that's a real asset so like I think csa is good at cost it's good at connection we're terrible at convenience so like on that part of it I think a lot of times farmers are struggling with that a little bit like and so we kind of would put out there like oh this is a 25 percent discount off of the farmers market prices and like other farmers were like why are you telling them it's a discount it's like you're they're not valuing the produce and I'm like what are y'all talking about it is a 25 percent discount like why wouldn't you own that to be excited about that and make them know like if you're going to be this valued customer we're going to give you a 25 percent discount in monetary value whether or not you do that or not I don't know but whatever discount you're giving I'm assuming the csa customer is getting some kind of discount name that so they feel good about that and then for that csa we have all of our shareholders box their own stuff other than now that we do the drive-thru thing but figure out ways that you can kind of cut corners because of that so that you don't have to put all the two pounds of carrots in a bag like they can do that for themselves other ways that you can make packing quicker and easier and then we also accept that ebt and double up food books like I said earlier I mean so then choice we're really vacant to choice on the farm too so we don't have a choice for everything on our farm but we have a choice on certain things and I'm going to show you this is a bunch of survey data that Garrett actually helped us with from our extension person and we did like a really really extensive every single crop that we grew like did we give you too much did we give you just right or did we give you too little and I wanted I wanted whatever it was that we were grown if it was beats like 70 percent should say that we are giving just the right amount and we went through every single one and then it's like where do we grow too much where do we go too little and the most interesting thing about all that surveying was like beats or Brussels sprouts like 25 percent said we gave them too many beats 25 percent said we gave them too little and it was the same with Brussels sprouts like what on earth do you do with that so we started calling those vegetables our love or hate vegetables like if grandma ruined beats or Brussels sprouts with for you which is like y'all know if that's generally the story with beats and Brussels sprouts like grandma pickled um or she just cooked a crap out of them or whatever like I am not going to convince you to get over that trauma unless you have a lot of food counseling or whatever it is so like stop trying to convince that customer like over and over and over again to like that vegetable which they're just not going to like give them a choice it could be even as simple as do you want a bundle of beats or do you want a bundle of Brussels sprouts it's like give them that choice and that pickup and so on our website it has this little thing on the right one of our youth employees made that one winner when we we had time and we we split our our vegetables into choosers so beats and Brussels sprouts are quintessential choosers like if you are into beats like you are into them um and Brussels or you really hate them and then you have your staples they're like your potatoes your carrots your tomatoes you don't need to give them to a customer and give them a choice like almost everybody eats so so you don't need to make that a complicated part of your csa then we have exotic which is like the fennel the karabi um the things that are really weird and so then I always want the choosers and the exotic to be part of a choice so a lot of times the exotic are part of like a quadrant of choices like do you want bok choy do you want fennel do you want karabi they all are basically taking up the same amount of space on a crop plan it's a pretty easy crop to give a choice on um and so that's kind of how we manage that um and then the last C is character this is my attempt to make the word quality mean C and then actually I thought about it more it actually is a pretty good word and so quality I just meant I originally meant I was thinking about it it's like you need to know how to grow broccoli like for real like figure that out because broccoli is hard or cauliflower like that purple cauliflower that you all showed a picture about like that's a farm because you got purple cauliflower like that yeah you want to show that photo um there's some hard ones like do your work to try to figure those out doesn't take time I mean like that that could take you three or four years to get your soil right to get cauliflower like that but when you get it you're going to post that one I know um but then be proud of that but so that's part of it right but this is a picture of somebody on social media where we did this butterhead lettuce thing and she took it home and put it in a vase and put it on her countertop and posted it which is like gold on the whole connection thing right but it's like who on earth would go to Maya or whatever story y'all do in Indiana you have Maya down here okay um like I'd never seen anybody take home stuff from the grocery store and put it on their counter and take a picture of it and post it like that's absurd that would be very irrational behavior but it's totally it makes total sense from a csa perspective right and so like our our produce has a character to it that's beyond even just high quality so it is the ball or purple cauliflower like but it's also like there's a story behind their food so there's a high level of character behind it so like kind of own that and kind of know that that's an important part of your product um and then similarly kind of that's my ball or broccoli post just to throw back at the purple cauliflower that that was intentional um but you know figure that out but then make make the the pickup look look good too um and then we have that add a dynamic where you know we're doing this this other value added social thing of connecting with you so that's also part of the story but each farm like y'all are all working hard you have cool families like you all have a lot of character behind your food so tell that story like make make a story be part of that food experience specifically about the youth i also work with the youth and you said the grant had just ended a couple of days ago which particular grant was that yeah so there's uh it's called a ser youth educator grant and so i think the maximum award now is six thousand for that and um basically yeah you're just going to write whatever narrative how you're connecting with those youth how you're teaching them about sustainable agricultural practices and yeah so it's it's a fairly quick application to put together so yeah okay then the second question is um you mentioned you have an inner city garden and then you have the outside gardens how far away are you from your rural gardens we're about 30 minutes out yeah so it's it's a bit of a challenge we have a lot of automation out there and then the off site so one of them is on the campus of a university so it's Grand Valley State University and they already have like a student farm there and so there's a farm manager that kind of watches that like if the curtains don't open and close or whatever we just basically kind of grow crops that kind of our low touch points for us where we don't kind of need to touch them two or three times a week and then the stuff that's like the cilantro or the really finicky stuff or the cut greens we're growing those in the city intentionally okay and how do you go about funding your youth that work on their farms um so the social enterprise you know generates a majority of the cost for the program so we are generating that 140,000 in revenue that's paying for two full-time adult staff at cost and then we're paying out about 25 to 30,000 in youth employment wages so they work with us three days a week in the summer so 18 hours a week some youth will return on their second year and then they become managers of a specific thing at that point and then we'll help co-manage their peers and then we we all are moving more into having young adult employees on us with us as well and so we'll have some outside grant funding that will then also support some of those additional positions yeah okay we could talk more about that after two for sure Lance I was wondering if you could talk more about some of the collaborative work you've done as with your farm and other like local nonprofits you know projects you've worked on or how you've kind of benefited from those collaborative efforts with others in the community yeah I would definitely add that to the equation so if you have an idea particularly that's socially minded like if you're all are farming like y'all are farming like so find the entities that are existing in your community that you can collaborate with so generally a good grant application already has collaboration in it so a grant funder typically wants to see those collaborative relationships but like go to your local community foundation like show up for whatever network and events are kind of happening like being here is an important thing to do but then connect to your extension people so like Garrett's kind of like my extension person that connect with a lot a lot of people in our area that are writing apps will like kind of clue Garrett in so this is an application that's being written and so there could be these big pots of money that are getting tossed around and they're looking for partners and then if you're a network then you get invited into a project and then like kind of the ideal spot to be as in when you have like somebody who has a full-time grant writer somebody who has like somebody who does all the reporting on a normal basis so these farmer rancher grants are easy ones in the grant world and then the other ones is like a whole another thing and like I think like 40% of farmer rancher grants gets funded like that's a good application to the right and the normal grant writing world like 10% if you're lucky and like you got to have all the cool buzzwords you kind of have to already be known by the grant reviewers it's like it's whole other thing and so unless you're jumping in on some of those collaborative relationships like it's kind of like honestly like a waste of your time and so like you kind of do want to know your extension people you want to you want to network you want to collaborate if you're trying to get into more of the nonprofit world or the grant writing world so I don't know if that's helpful kind of answers your question thank you so much farmers for your time appreciate it