 So just a little bit about reading the countryside, I think we're on our, I don't know, 17th or 18th year, and we really work to kind of champion and help whether you're a person or an organization or a business that is trying to relieve a countryside with innovative ideas that are both, are combining kind of that triple bottom line of economics, community, and economics, community, and environment. So this fits within the sorts of things that we do. A couple of the things that we've been doing recently is we're hosting a big national conference next week in Red Wing called the National Farm Liability Conference. We do a feast. We have the Feast Local Foods Network. Has anybody heard of the Feast Local Foods Marketplace? Okay, great. We had a couple of people in the room, so we do an event down in Rochester with vendors from Minnesota, food makers from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa that source from local farmers. Some of them are farmers themselves, others are local farmers, and do a big festival this year on December 7th. There's also a business to business day training day with buyers on December 6th. We have a farmland access hub. It's a partnership of many organizations in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. We're hosting an Upper Midwest Farmland Summit on Monday in Red Wing. We do some farm-to-child care work, both in the Twin Cities and in greater Minnesota. And then in terms of the women programming, we've always re-worked with Lisa for a really long time. And Soil Sisters has recently, having heard of Soil Sisters, quite a few of you, has recently become hard to read in the countryside, which we're really excited about. And we've also partnered with the Women's Food and Ag Network, hoping to put out a living career in the land. Circles here in Minnesota have done probably, I don't know, probably 20 to 30 of those in the last six years. And then we've also done some projects. We did a project where we had women partner farmers who had different parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and had them learn about, through contract with the Farm Service Agency, learn about what programs were with the Farm Service Agency, and not that they could invite other women in their communities in and then introduce them to people from the Farm Service Agency, because that's an agency that has history and not traditionally working with women to open the door. So that's some of the work that we do. And then these are our farm partners. And I think I've been, I think I've been on four or three of these farms. So Susan Wachtal from Squash, Pots and Fire down in southeastern Minnesota, Eva Barr, Dreamacres, also in southeastern Minnesota, Aubrey Arner from Moonstone, who was here, and I was like, where are you together? I mean, these other women here at the contract? Yeah, Aubrey was here. Here is your Mary Ann from Camp at DeBello, Diane Webster from Board of Farm Project, Heather Seacrest from Central Scourges, and Stephanie Schneider from Together Farms. So these are showcased, and you'll hear more about some from Lisa. And then what you need to know to serve on your farm, as Lisa was saying, a safe place, and we have really a hidden gem in the room. We have Jane Dua from the Minnesota Institute of Sustainable Agriculture, who was part of this publication, part of the team, but also who is just one of the state experts in terms of regulatory problems. She's read the feed code. Whenever I have a question, whenever farmers have a question, she's involved in some really interesting efforts and has been kind of moving things forward in Minnesota to make it easier for farmers and food makers to get their answers addressed and to have more clarity across the system in terms of regulations and licenses. So this is the reason that we did this, was to help farmers make good decisions before investing. So everybody loves the idea of having a pizza farm. Most people would like people love the idea of having a pizza farm or something like that on their farm. But it's not as simple as you would like to think. So anyhow, so we realized this and, you know, Lisa has hands-on experience. And so the idea was really to put together something that provided tools to do a business assessment, to ask to get people that, before they jumped into something like this to really ask the questions they needed to know, to share some case studies so people can see different ways that people are doing it and both what's working for them and what their struggles have been. And then, as I mentioned earlier, to delve down deep into the different laws, rules and regulations that you have to follow, or that you should follow if you want to be doing this on a board. And then also to do a customer assessment, because that's something that we hadn't done in our previous work, we had actually eight of the customers who came to these food services again there. So what James just outlined there is this toolkit, which is again the free resource. We had version one and now we have addition two officially via this SARE project. So what we have is we had version one, if you'd like a paper take home copy, we realized quickly that we don't want to make too many paper copies because things keep changing. The first section is really pretty much the same. This is the assessment part of is this a good thing for you? How does this fit in your business plan, et cetera? The Minnesota and Wisconsin, what would you say, do you have like 88% still there? 9%? Yeah, so please take one, could we have them printed, but please also sign up on here and we'll send you the link and you can download the new version of Minnesota or Wisconsin. And for folks from other states, yes, you have specific state regulations, but at least a good 75% of this is very similar. It's not like night and day, it's shades of gray between states, but each state can write their own regulations when it comes to food. And then the other elements, we'll talk about the case studies and the research are all online to download too. So if you want to pass that around, I'll be sure to get you the link so you've got everything fresh. Then we can give you a posted one version. Thanks. I'm Grace Burrman, I work with Janet and I'm the countryside release of many projects. One quick little quiz to just kind of see where you are on this. These are just a sampling of questions that you might want to keep in mind. Am I comfortable making decisions? Can I handle risk and situations where there's no simple yes or no answer? There might be some gray area. We've heard about gray area. Do I have a strong network of friends and family that I can rely on for support and help, including someone to watch my children opinion if they're having to be children involved? You'll be really busy and you'll be hosting people on your own. Can I accept an even embrace failure? It's important to keep trying new ideas, learning and adapting. Some may prove more fruitful than others. So this is a way to explore all the different ways that this could be. It's the multiple eggs in the basket, seeing which one works for you. And I don't take someone to know as the ultimate answer and always ask a lot of questions. When it comes to the regulatory area, there could be different perceptions and meanings of, or cultural perceptions through how that person was trained of what those details are. Being questions, being detail oriented, being willing to be curious and kind of pursue what does that actually mean? Let's go all the way back to the source. Let's ask some of our colleagues, like Jane, who can help us navigate these different interpretations to get down to the bottom of it. Being curious and willing to ask those questions can be really helpful. So checking in on a few of these things could help you determine whether or not it's a good fit for you. Food product versus food service. This is HR of Pickles. I made this in my home kitchen in Wisconsin under our Pickle Bill, which is our cottage food law. This is a food product. In most cases, food products are regulated through your Department of Agriculture. If I pop this open and I put it on a stick, so I can sell it to your market. If I pop it open and I put it on a stick and I sell it to you, so I do, for example, breads in my home kitchen in Wisconsin. I can sell you that loaf of bread if I start slicing it. If I put cheese on it, food service. One thing I want to touch on real quick, and we can get back to this if people are interested, it's generally called group freedom laws, and these are happening. They first happened at Wyoming and Nevada. I thought, for the life of me, they would not come to the Midwest for at least another decade. This is called the lemonade law. This past January, Minnesota just passed what's called the lemonade law, but it goes beyond lemonade. It opens up interesting opportunities for very small scale different types of food processing and service on your farm. So just hold up the back of your mic. We can get back to that, but that's very new, very interesting, and even more confusing than existing health regulations, because it's so new. Okay, sorry. So when we were talking before about the reasons you might be interested in doing this, I think somebody talked about selling items, selling products, but most everybody answered with the good stuff, right? I want to build community. I want to bring people on my farm. I want the kids to run barefoot. All these good things, which are fantastic, that keep that goal in mind as we move forward, because you can do that through a pilot this weekend. Same end result of bringing people on your farm and sharing. You can still sell your product. You could have a farm stand out. You could do a lot of things. People can still bring food and share food, and it's a whole lot simpler. So just as we move forward, keep it in mind and what your goals are, because to do what we're going to be talking about, your ultimate goal needs to be make money on your farm, and how can that be done most efficiently, and you read all these materials and say, hey, this is not for me. My goals are purely focused on the community side. That is also fantastic, but think about the best way to do that. So let's picture our farm. You have an old hog shed in Serendipity that's our cantina in the summer. We house tons of potlucks with all sorts of things around them, but I'm not selling tickets. They're not food service. So as we move on, just keep that in mind. Now, that's it. Just about every state now, there has a potluck law on the books, which we could debate if that's necessary, but in Wisconsin, the health department started showing up at church funerals and sticking thermometers and grandma's meatballs and she got pissed. So there is legislation that basically says if you legally gather voluntarily and exchange food and no money is exchanged, it's okay. The health department doesn't have to be involved, but there aren't even specific things within that in your state's rights. So potluck's good. Then here, and there's the printed version of this in the manual, is kind of a flowchart on if you need a license. And you can kind of take yourself through, but as you can see in Big Red, yes, for just about anything else other than a potluck and bringing a dish to pass, and that's it, you will need a license of some sort. So what I'm going to do is a couple quick ideas to start you thinking on the easy on-rack before we talk about building a commercial kitchen. So partnerships, and that's exactly what you were wonderfully doing on your farm of partnering with other entities that have the licensing, that have the commercial kitchen. So this would be with a restaurant or event planner, a chef who is basically preparing the food off-site at the commercial kitchen, whether it's theirs, whether they read that, it really doesn't matter to you because they're doing it all legitimately. It's a low time commitment, it's an amazing opportunity to see even if you like this, and that's huge. We write about that a lot in the toolkit to get folks thinking, you know, just because you love having your family reunion every summer and there's people around and you're feeding them, does that translate to 100, 200 people showing up every Friday night for pizza? No, she says no. But it's something to think about and this is an easy way to do this. So dinner on the farm, Monica Walsh's operation is Minnesota based and that's exactly what she does with the event planning side. She does all the coordinating with local chefs, coordinating the local food, anything and everything that you would need to do, she does. So we had hosted one on our farm, Monica, me, husband, John, for our soul sister's weekend a couple years ago and her thing is, you know, I do these on farms and a farmer could be working in the field, take a shower at two o'clock and have a beer and enjoy their event at three, four, which is true. And there's a small, usually a token payment just for some rentals or things on the farm, but it's not a money-making effort. But that said, if you want to give something, an opportunity for your customers or there's something else you've got to meet in your community, it definitely is a way to do that, a way to get people on the farm and eating. So yeah, that's that, there's a, increasing these chefs in restaurants that are more familiar with how to do these, or the whole idea of a food truck too, the bottom line is that you're not preparing the food. So a second way is for you to utilize a local commercial kitchen. So basically you are licensed as a caterer or whatever else would be needed to do that, and you are renting the appropriate kitchen. An appropriate kitchen is really important here because commercial kitchens are not one-size-fits-all in a really quick nutshell. They vary based on what they are licensed to do. So sometimes, increasingly church kitchens are licensed to do more food items, but not necessarily. So it's something to definitely ask. But, that's it. One of our farm partners, the Belazzini's Marianne and Mark at Campo de Bella in Mount Hora, they have okay, not have, they had a CSA, and I'll get back to that. They had a CSA, a vegetable CSA, had moved to kind of south of Madison, but they loved the hosting idea, they're Italian, they wanted to do more of this, what could we do. So, they smartly rented out, in this case their parish kitchen, and did these off-site farm-to-table dinners with their CSA base. Again, no investment. Now here they retained their earnings. They went through some more licensing that they could charge for it and they were making the money coming in versus working with the event planner and it's bottom line to give testing opportunity because they are not going to debt over it. Now, there are people like the Belazzini's who said hey, we love this, this is great, this is our calling. So flash forward five years, they built and it's basically, as we called it in this project, this is the Cadillac of on-farm kitchen, this is basically a restaurant on their farm, they call it a cafe. Campo de Bella, they have a full kitchen, they do small plates, they do a lot of catered events, and they mention they're Italian, let's have a winery there too, so they do some small batch bringing. They are figuring out as they go, and one thing I wanted to give a plug for the Belazzini's and all of the farm partners in this SARE project, and just in SARE in general, is that collaborative spirit of farms, I mean this doesn't make any business sense, right? Why would you invite people who are basically going to start the same thing you did and learn the hard way and share all that you learned and give tips and advice on doing it differently? Because that's what we do, right? And we all realize that the more of these operations, I mean the Belazzini's goal is to have southern Wisconsin like the Napa of farm to table, agriturs and restaurants. I'm like, yeah, yeah, so, but this costs 200 grand, it's their baby, they're going to do this for the rest of their lives, to just pay that off at minimum, you know, so it's a big leap, but it was a smart a very smart way to do it, and all the farms I'm talking about here are full case studies in the manual that you can read, except for Dorothy's range, but I wanted to just mention this April Pruget is a local farmer by me, who was actually a speaker at one of our field days, same kind of process though, she she's at the conference, she did the meat intensive, she's all about hogs, heritage hogs and getting more people eating real pork etc, but she was finding that people didn't really know what real pork tasted like and this need to do more in the on-farm food service, so in her case, she got a catering license, she rents out the small local cafe in her small town, in the evenings, and has done some catered events like this, she has a large barn but again, fully licensed etc, now, one thing that often happens, because this is such a new so relatively new and hot idea, is you start putting your feelers out there, and things go in ways that you might not have predicted, so April's in my local group, and we have as I mentioned the soil sisters weekend in August, and this was three years ago when she was literally going to do her first event like I had talked to her a year before saying, hey, we really need a farm to table event around this weekend, you were talking about getting your catering license, what do you think about doing it a year from now and it was November, you know, she said oh yeah, that sounds good, that sounds like a good goal so everything got crazy until July and August, getting ready for this event I don't know, she's probably cursing my name somewhere in there, but then she really cursed my name 48 hours before her first event, when I got this call saying a lot of farmers coming, and they want to shoot your event, like literally, the whole thing, and she did it brilliantly, and with Grace and Jim I believe, but afterwards but these things happen, so you just gotta be prepared for the unexpected and I want to give a plug in this, I do a lot of just food and farm writing, this month's October issue of hobby farms has a feature on April where she talks about these things too from a business perspective, so she calls the shots, she does the events when she wants to do them, and it's just a handful a year and some little private events, okay so I'm moving on to on-farm meals so these are the regular meals that would require commercial kitchen insight, period hold that thought, because I want to quickly talk about the pizza farms, because that just is what is the thing right, and there are reasons people do pizza farms as we get to talk about, because I don't want to use the word easier, because that is down the wrong path, but it is more specific of food item and you're not changing your menu and that's what was huge, so it's interesting, when we started this project there was an article, it was probably about five years ago now, in USA Today about this hot trend of pizza farms in the Midwest and at the time there were five three in Minnesota, two in Wisconsin now I lost count, I mean there's well over 15 to 20, but hold that thought, we'll talk about it at the end of some of the case study stories what we need to be thinking about is what is the next pizza farm, I don't know if this is saturated, but there's a whole lot of them, but there's still people who want to come out and eat on your farm what's, who's talking about oh, your sausage it's exactly what you want to go, well no no, I mean it's not it's not something like that, it's, you're going to be local where you are, and then here's some stories of what different people are doing, but that's exactly what we need to be thinking okay, pizza farms typically only do pizza that's really important, because when you and this is the stuff to process through before you call the health department, you need to know what you're making so please don't call the health department and say I don't know what I'm making, I don't know what's right next to me or da da da da it doesn't fit the checkbox, pizza fits the checkbox, it's hot it comes out of a 900 degree oven and you can change the toppings but they get what it is it's typically sort of takeout style right, so there's not a restaurant attached to it with other things and most states have some sort of limitation on the number of these types of events you could do typically under 20-ish, which nicely correlates with a night or two a weekend or you know, of course, so still the acres of more of our partners get there in this situation where the pizza nights are making more money than the CSA and what does that mean, and what are all the complications around that so real quick, the commercial kitchen setup for a pizza farm when Kat Becker did this at the time and you see some pictures there, this is not very pretty, you know, it's pretty basic she did it for under 5 grand scouting used equipment for a year they had another renovation projects going on that they could tie this into so there were costs savings, so that's like, I'm giving you the real low low low bar and it took a lot of time to get there, but again that's all they're doing there, they're making dough they're making sauce, etc now, that said, they are also really neat and here's where that we were talking, Grace was talking about, are you comfortable with the gray zone and more so when you're comfortable asking questions paragraph inspector at the time was saying hey, you need, I think it was $15,000 range hood just like McDonald's has because you're cooking meat and she's like, wait a minute I don't want to spend $15 she spent $15,000 on that the person coming in to do the inspection is not empowered to say oh, I realize you're only using that one hour for 20 weeks, you know that's okay, so you need to find out who in the chain of command makes those decisions and get an exemption in this case from the higher up in the state then the local person has that piece of paper oh okay, we understand so there are several people but you need to ask those questions very labor intensive and very weather dependent on pizza farms so it's a lot of people that need to come together to make this happen now that depends on your scale and you'll see some of that in the case studies but if you're open and whoever shows up also very weather dependent when it rains people don't want to come when they're five year old cute daughters you know, in the rain for pizza so a lot of variables there okay, so research conducted over this last year about what's happening with on farm food surface so we could get a sense of what is the customer experience like what is working, what do people want a little bit of market analysis out there as far as we know this is the first time such data has been collected so it's a first step hopefully we can keep collecting more as this continues to grow and a shout out to Elena Carroll with B.W. Stout a graduate who helped us with this research project which was at seven farms surveyed throughout the summer of 2018 reaching 151 participants so 151 visitors to these seven farms trying to get a sense of what their experience was like what they were looking for on visiting the farm what their experience was at the farm so a couple of highlights for you we like this number right up here 100% of customers enjoyed their overall experience people are excited to be out there and they're having a great time it's not that often that you get 100% customer satisfaction so that's there's a desire and there's a need and there's a market opportunity there we had 68% of folks heard about the events word of mouth so keeping that in mind there's a lot of conversations in the community who's asking who paid advertising with 18% social media 16% how are you communicating with your existing markets how would you like to spread that word and if you mind that word of mouth in your community for those who might be visiting is a big one who are the customers 50% of the customers in this research were families families with children 25% were groups of friends groups of friends and families constituted really two big groups of people who were coming out someone who was looking for family-friendly activities or something to do on an evening with their group of friends so those are two things to keep in mind when you're looking at your potential business models 22% were customers of the customers were couples going on a date and continuing to think about what are these customers looking for when they're coming to visit let's see what else are some highlights I'd like to share we can go to the next page here I think that the top five reasons people visited I think is helpful well number one was one of these was pizza people are excited about pizza they come for the delicious pizza and the dessert pizza too so you've got to diversification within your pizza offerings another priority for a lot of people is quality and organic ingredients sure they're excited to come out and visit the farm if they're considering doing that as part of the meal there is an interest in what is going into the meal that's great to know for your customers who are coming on your farm or your other market endeavors whether they're potential csa customers or what have you caring about what's in their ingredients family and family friendly and gathering with friends are two things that come up in those top five reasons people are coming so we see that both in top five reasons people are visiting as well as who are the customers that are coming how are they identifying themselves and the on the farm outdoor experience that they're spending with the place in this really special way that a lot of people don't get to do we can share this with you when you're signing up on the spreadsheet for more data a nice, you can't read them here but 98%, 99% of customers satisfied with the customer service and the quality of food really good high numbers there to keep in mind but also knowing that customers are keeping those things in mind we'll be juggling a lot of roles if you're doing this customer service is one of them so people are paying attention to that is a number of things that we leverage through this research project again we can share more there but really interesting information to just kind of help guide you when you're thinking about what the market wants and what's happening right now so one thing too when we're talking about the research of folks and family experience these families are coming though wanting a farm experience and how do you do that when all of your staff is making pizzas it's been a real challenge for a lot of the farms and some have done things through signage like self guided tours they want to have the whole thing and take a selfie with the goats and how can you facilitate that or is it worth having another staff to help with that etc it's kind of hard to decide a couple of the farm partners so three makers Ava Barr the women involved with these businesses are just amazing creative women who have these multiple layers of lives and talents and things and for them and perhaps yourself it culminates in this business so Ava is like a amazing actress on her own right she's founded Looking Glass Theater in Chicago she's bouncing back and forth but as you see on the left she also has this farming side to her and not just farming but lives off brick so their place their husband Todd, Dream Acres very different than a lot of the other pizza farms in that A it's off brick they're the first licensed commercial kitchen that doesn't plug into the outlet wall try explaining that to the health department and kudos to them and kudos to all of these farms who have done this already because each and every one of them has had their set of challenges and has really pioneered it for things to come this one in particular, it's like what do you mean you're jutting your entire refrigerator down well we don't need it until next Friday and those things take time they take patience, they take explanation but kudos to them so theirs is much smaller they cap it about 80 pizzas a night they are vegetarian they're vegetarian themselves they have vegetarian pizzas they have some kind of vegetarian sausage but Ava's first to say I probably lose people who want the sausage on their pizza is what we do, so it's very much value driven and as you saw with her theatrical background she also has a nonprofit on the farm for rural arts so there's a lot of that just creative vibe going on there her son delivers the pizzas on stilts, you know that sort of thing and that's what they do and they keep it to a scale that's manageable and I wanted to start off with this because it's important to think about because just because people want to come to your farm doesn't mean you have to take anybody things have to grow to such a scale what would make sense for you and they also part of the reason they did this and it's interesting when you hear the stories is there might be multiple things that prompt you to get commercial in the kitchen capacity they also had a, through the nonprofit a summer camp, and even though it is a nonprofit increasingly camps are getting commercial kitchens too so it all made sense to kind of do it at once so another person who is an artist and also always wanted to live on a farm a diversified farm and so just don't know what she did prior to farming but I know that her husband who works in the architecture world this was just always a dream and so finally they just decided that at 50 to jump off and do this so they bought a farm in Orinoco which is lovely it's got all sorts of peace and ducks and chickens and a couple of highland cattle but she too wanted to do food service on the farm so they were selling it farmers market and then they started doing some research into what it would take to actually do this legally and realize it was going to take a lot so they actually ended up doing a Kickstarter and raised $25,000 to build the commercial kitchen on their farm and put it in the pizza oven and so they've been doing dinners and I don't remember how many they do pizza, they just do pizza they also do bread, baked they take to the farmers market and they build other places too and then they do a ton of events where husband is also a musician they have music on the farm with their pizza and I think she says if you want her to let me see yours that's a whole other beast but also I remember when we did the field day out there I remember her husband Roger almost kind of choked up because I think part of what made their business model possible was that his mom passed away within this process and left them some funding which they had inheritance that they were able to basically put into the farm to do this so it can be a really extensive endeavor and so I think there's so much excitement about doing this but there's also the business reality of doing it and you really have to figure out you know it's the old how do you make this $30,000 farming you started doing so it can be done but you really have to be business savvy and don't go into it you know thinking that everybody's going to come there is a lot to do around it the full data it tracks mileage it's generally about an hour people drive about an hour so several of the ones like dream makers in Waikop is drive a bullish from the cities Rochester area however some of them like Suncrest Gardens and kind of Central Middle of Nowhere, Wisconsin is Central Middle of Nowhere, Wisconsin so yeah that general metro area is a good draw if you've got it an interesting one born or farm project is in Hudson so right over the border it was originally a farm and has a lot of land almost like a park in the middle of town and the folks running it who are involved with our case study wonderful people very committed to community and all of that happily all summer long with their city because now it's growing too big and it's in the city so you've got they're getting the people but then the city didn't want it so it's a constant kind of thing so the federal food code is written by the food and drug administration and it comes out of the pure food and drug act like back in the 1930s and states adopted and can add to it because they can't take away from it so in Minnesota the food code is part of Minnesota rules there are statutes which are laws passed by the legislature and then there are rules which are interpretations of statute and so the Minnesota food code is based on that FDA food code but adopted by Minnesota