 All right, we're gonna go ahead and get started. It is seven o'clock, so welcome. Just to introduce myself, my name is Lindy Berg. I am the Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension Agent for NDSU for Town or County. And I'd like to welcome you, Fihap and myself and our small farm team as well. Travis, who you'll meet here a little bit, he's a part of our team and kind of initiated this whole webinar series. So I'm glad to have you guys for the fourth of a five-part webinar series. Today is Building Your Consumer Relationships for Success. I just have a few housekeeping items. First of all, and like I just mentioned, there is a pre-survey link in the chat. Please go ahead and fill that out. There is a poll as well right now you guys should see. So go ahead and fill that out as well. Just a couple of things that the small farm team has been working on. We're a pretty new team with NDSU Extension in the last few years. And we did just finish a new publication which is called Beginner's Guide to Raising Chicken. So if you know anybody that'd be interested in that, that is out there if you wanna look that up. And then for those of you that are interested in writing grants or if you do write grants, that is something that will be coming up as well is a Beginner's Guide to Grant Writing Workshop. So that there should be a Save the Date coming out in June and it'll be two days this fall. So basically you have that day one, you're gonna have your proposal outline. We'll give you all the resources you need to expand that outline into a full proposal. And then the second day, you will come back with that full proposal and we'll put you into the role of the reviewer, teach you some strategies for finding funding, providing you with the opportunity to polish that proposal to get ready for submission. So if you're interested in that, just keep an eye out for that. That'll be coming out like I said, the Save the Date will come out in June. Questions, if you guys have questions, please put them in the chat and we will get to those. So once again, this is the fourth of five webinars that we've gone through. And so we've gone through discussing getting Life's Life Ready for Harvest and those finishing strategies to local meats in the schools and farmers markets, to the retail side of things and how the importance of communication in those relationships are on the process, on the processing side of those things too. One thing in each webinar that I've noticed is how much we emphasize trust and that's been brought up each week. And so we know how big trust is when we start talking about that consumer relationship. And who we have today on our panel is Annie and Isaac. And of course we have Travis too, who will introduce himself and we'll get them all introduced. And so I'm excited to have them here today. They both have a lot of experience. And it's really nice to see how different and unique everybody is in their own operation and how they got started and maintain their repeated customers. So the first, oh, and I will hand it over to Travis here. Thank you, Lindy. I just wanted to give a little bit of a background of kind of where we've been to set the stage and as we move into kind of our customer relationships there. And so the first webinar that we hosted was on getting livestock ready for harvest. And in fact, how do animals grow and then meeting that logical endpoint of the slaughter times, certainly important depending on whether you are a beefet producer, a swine producer, a sheep producer or a goat producer. And in fact, then as we talk next week in our poultry and primarily chicken operations but keeping that open from a poultry standpoint as well. And so that was our first webinar that we hosted and that is available as well. And our second webinar that we have, Lindy was focused at local farmers markets and then also pulling together the individuals that we had for the Farm to School program, Lindy. So if you wanna move to our second option, we touched a little bit as again as our NDSU Extension small farms team of pulling those ideas and thoughts together. And so one of the things that we had, I show you just an example of the farmer's market that Wolf suffix hosted at different locations but we also had the collaboration with the North Dakota Department of Agriculture. And then we also had our North Dakota group of the Farm to School program of just kind of pulling that together as well. And the last one that we did was on retail inventory and management. So that was our third topic that we had and talking about Lindy, if you can pull to our next slide of just pulling together what happens on, what do we produce in relation to whatever that given industry was? That one focused just a little bit more on a sheep production because as we think about it from a beef standpoint, we a lot of times will sell either the whole animal or halves or quarters. And a lot of the times the swine producers will sell those as either whole or halves as well. But we had more in terms of the retail management of our operations. And so keeping those ideas kind of pulling that together. And our last one, Lindy, to give a promo again was again our approach with a poultry focused one for the last one. And Lindy, I'll pass it to you and close our poll. And so one last point of information for those that have attended is if you can fill out that participant poll and we will be moving on with our talented guest speakers. All right. Isaac is gonna be our first speaker here and just a quick little intro about him. So he's currently a graduate student at NDSU. He's originally from Kansas and he attended Kansas State University for his undergrad. But he grew up on a beef and sheep ranch where they locally produce high quality beef and lamb. His parents own and operate Rush Creek cattle company and Brunco family lamb in Lamego, Kansas. Since the 1890s. And they direct sell lamb to consumers in contract with Yoder meat market in Yoder, Kansas. And so they provide lamb to their storefront. And then Isaac, he's a little hands off at the moment for some of it since he's attending NDSU. But he does still handle a lot of the research and development side of things surrounding the lamb products and new recipes that contribute and also contributes to their social media accounts. So he'll give us some updates on that. So I will hand it over to you Isaac. Thank you. Yeah, no, I currently am studying under Travis Hoffman at NDSU doing some local meats development for my research. But my family owns and operates Brush Creek Cattle Company like Lindy was saying in North Eastern Kansas. And we have some Herford Angus and Sim Angus Cross Cattle. The Bronco family lamb's relatively new addition to our family. And I say that loosely because we've been running sheep since I was a fifth grader. But we've had cattle my whole life. So the lamb side of things is kind of newer to us. We focus mostly on blackface cross, but we do have some door sits. And then my personal favorite, I have a small flock of South Downs that I got in a grant from the Kansas Sheep Association. As she said earlier, we partnered with Yoder meat market which is in South Central Kansas. And we provide lamb for their storefront. And then they also do our processing for us for our direct marketing to consumers from our operation. And continue on past that, focus on a little more on social media. Go to the, there we go. Oh, so for our lamb, we do have some different things going on. We grain finish our lambs and we focus on direct sales currently through social media. Although we are doing some new stuff with having our own website and moving past that Facebook marketplace that we have traditionally used. And then we also have that Yoder meat market storefront where consumers in Southern Kansas can walk in and buy individual cuts right off the store shelves. And they will be advertised with our logo and stuff which is kind of neat. My family is really active in ag advocacy. My father is on the State Farm Bureau Board for Kansas. And my parents have been active in young farmers and ranchers and my mother does a lot of work with the land of Kansas which is the equivalent of Pride of North Dakota. But we try to do a little more with social media and showing just the day-to-day aspects of our livelihood. My father ranches full-time now and so he gets to do a little bit more of that especially just showing himself out with the lambs, building fence, doing all the day-to-day stuff that maybe people don't necessarily think about which moves past that meat sales a little bit. As I said, we partnered with Land of Kansas and we are represented on their website through the Kansas Department of Ag. We do work with 4-H and FFA. My father does a lot of speaking at FFA and 4-H events especially considering he was originally a 4-H agent from my home county. And then we also do a lot of work with Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau's been a big part of my life and I'm even a Farm Bureau member in North Dakota currently. I joined under Cass County when I moved up here to NDSU. So talking about the social media a little bit and I have a screenshot up here in the right of our new website we're using with under Barn to Door but originally got started with Facebook Marketplace when we started up our social media market. We try to post actively. Like I do incorporate a lot of recipes and when I try to cook something with lamb I try to take a picture of it and try to make it a little fairly attractive and post the recipe and maybe a little short blurp of what I made. For example, the recipe I have down on the bottom right I talked about how it was really good warming recipe that I made in this negative 30 degree weather we had here this past winter. And then also like Lindy was saying I like try recipes out. Luckily it's not usually a bad thing. My roommate and girlfriend I think sometimes appreciate it but sometimes I could be wrong. And then we also try to offer specials. And we have the one at the bottom the picture of the bundle at the bottom shows our Valentine's Day special that my dad had put together for $50 if I believe correctly that's the right bundle but we try to bundle these things together so people can get a little more variety in their life they don't get just hung up in that one cut that they really know and are really used to. Below that I have the link to my family's new website and it's still working out some bugs but we've done it under a new partner Barn2Door they are helping us manage our online inventory and then also doing some marketing that they partner with us to show us a more attractive way to do stuff and how something might look better for a consumer. And then my, in addition to that my dad also has a column in the grass and grain and then some other local newspapers and stuff but it all started with his blog Dust on the Dashboard and so we get some coverage through that just talking day-to-day especially about what he's been doing and that gets a little side effect of that is he talks about our family business some and so that also helps out. Carrying on about that ag advocacy your consumers wanna know what you do there has been a rise especially with the social media and being connected all the time people wanna know where their food comes from they wanna know the day-to-day of the people raising it the picture my father down here has him speak into some people that came out on ag tours through Kansas Farm Bureau and he's explaining when he's decided when he decides to cut corn to him by showing them the dents on the corn cob. We try to educate the consumer and this is really important especially with cuts or meat products such as lamb because if people cook lamb wrong they get the wrong impression about it especially if it's overcooked and not seasoned properly or even just not something doesn't go right with it it's important to get that face-to-face interaction with your consumer to teach them how to enjoy your product because everybody I've cooked lamb for really enjoys it some of those people have had a bad experience before and so it's all about educating them how to make their experience better and then one of my favorite parts and part of the reason I have south downs is young kids really get along well with sheep I do a lot with teaching kids about how to show sheep and I'm not a great showman but it's important to me to teach young people that interconnection with agriculture and these are two of the young women that have shown for me in the past at the bottom and I like to go back and support the people that have come and buy from me because they're important to our livelihood. All right, so really quick I just had a couple of questions Isaac before we keep going but and I like how you mentioned I mean you're definitely covering a lot of platforms and it is important for people wanna connect with your family even and just get to know who you are and your family but you had mentioned the bad experience too that some people have had bad experiences and so you kind of touched on a little bit but how would you kind of recover from that or help people that maybe it wasn't from you it was from someone else, how do you help people? Sometimes it is just offering them a little two pack of lamb chops. That's usually the best entry point from my personal experience to getting people to want to try lamb again is give them a simple recipe, one I usually use is salt and pepper on a lamb chop and then marinate it overnight with Italian salad dressing and I've gotten really good results from that because it's such a simple recipe people don't feel like they're investing a lot of time and it's not that they're changing the makeup or the profile of the lamb that much it's just that they're seizing it to the degree that lamb or even beef needs to be required to do to enjoy. So that's the other options are even with younger people I've had more luck getting them to try ground lamb through I talked to last week about beer rock I've snuck that in on some of my friends back in Kansas because they look at it and they just expect it to be ground beef but I've snuck some ground lamb in there for some get togethers with some friends and they were shocked that it wasn't beef. They just there's something that was different about it but it wasn't bad. And so it's all about well and then there's a comment below lamb kebabs are another good option. It's all about finding those things that people want to try that low risk and high reward. Sure. The other question that I had was on social media do you touch on any of like Twitter? I'm not a social media buff so I don't even know what all is out there but like Twitter is one of them that are out there do you use any of those kinds of are you mostly on the website and? We're mostly on Facebook. My dad does some with Instagram but I'm not super savvy with it or Twitter. So I'm not the best with technology which is should be support for everybody else that I'm able to go on and figure out how to post the recipe on Facebook. And I think that's the widest social media platform you can use to get people because everybody has a Facebook it seems like but not everybody has a Snapchat or Twitter. I tried to do some stuff on Instagram when I can but my dad's a little more successful at that than I am to be honest. My sister does a little more on Instagram too but sometimes I'm going back to the recipe thing. I'm making this recipe and trying all the stuff out. I forget to take a picture then. Let's always remember and that's one thing I'm learning myself is you gotta be present in knowing what you're doing but then also be present to the point where you remember to take a picture and provide that evidence to post maybe on social media for your consumers. Sometimes I struggle with remembering to do that. My dad's a lot better about it than I am though. Well, I don't blame you there. I don't know how many times that I go through something. I'm like, I didn't take a picture. I meant to. Thank you, Isaac. I appreciate it. We'll come back when we have questions and like we said, if anybody has any questions, feel free to put those in the chat and we can get to those too. And Travis, if you see any that I don't catch, feel free to mention those. All right, so we have Annie, Annie White-Carrison. She was born and raised on the Northern Plains and continues to farm and ranch. She has Morning Joy Ranch which is a third generation family owned pasture-based local market farm located in Central North Dakota. And she has lots of careers. I was just talking to her about this. I was accused so much between being a science teacher, a basketball coach, biology professor, farmer, mom, wife, speaker, author, entrepreneur, doing all those things plus being a caterer, a pastor, artist, all the things. So she's got a little bit of knowledge of everything but she loves encouraging others to try new things which is perfect for this. And they are really in the regenerational business. So we're talking about regenerating that land, the food system economy, the communities and all those kinds of things. So welcome, Annie and I'm gonna let you take it over and I will stop sharing so you can. So I am Annie Carlson. I am with Morning Joy Farm and Kitchen. The Ann Kitchen part was started in 2014 when we built a commercial kitchen onto the farm. So tonight we're talking about building those consumer relationships. And we've been a direct market farm since 2008. Some topics that we're gonna talk about tonight, we're gonna talk about different proteins have different problems. And I'll tell you all the proteins that we raise and sell but I'm talking about the challenges and opportunities that you have within each one. We're gonna talk about how do we find customers? I have a product, I wanna sell it. How do I get the people to sell to you? And then how do we grow the business? Maybe we've sold a little bit, we'd like to sell some more. So how do I grow my business? What are some avenues to growth? And then how do I communicate? How do I communicate with shareholders, with partners? How do I communicate with customers? And how do I keep those lines of communication open? So those are the topics that I'm gonna touch on this evening. First, a little bit of an introduction. Those are my three kids and two of our horses down below there. And we started in 2008 as a vegetable CSA. That's also the year we had our first trial. And proceeded to have three kids in three years. My kids were literally cabbage patch kids. And we decided to add pastured meat in 2010. Our CSA customers were asking, where can we find, your vegetables are awesome. Where can we find local meat and pasture-based meat? And we didn't know. And so I said to John, he had grown up on a farm that was only grain. And I lovingly tell him, oh honey, that wasn't a real farm. And I grew up on the farm that we currently live on now. And we were very diverse. We had sheep for many years. Then we transitioned to cattle. And so we had chickens and goats and all sorts of stuff, pigs. And so I was very familiar with livestock. And so we added pastured meats in 2010. We moved back to Mercer or to my parents' farm, bought the farm from them in 2012. So we've been here for 10 years. And I am never moving again. My retirement house is a yurt in the pasture because I am never moving again. The proteins that we currently sell and have sold, chicken, eggs, both duck and chicken, we sell turkey, we've sold goose, lamb, pork and beef. And so we've sold all of those proteins. Happy to talk about any of them. We're not gonna touch on production tonight because that's not the focus, but I can talk on production of those two at some other time. And then sales avenues that we've used, farmers markets, the CSA model for both meat and vegetables. We've done meal kits. I was blue apron, Morning Joy Farm and Kitchen was blue apron before there was blue apron. Hello, Fresh. We've done buying clubs, like monthly buying clubs. We've done bulk order meats. And we've have relationships with grocery stores and co-ops. And so I can talk about any of those marketing avenues as well. So the first question we wanna talk about is what are your customers today? And so all the pictures that are in my presentation tonight are of our meat that I have made. And so these are lamb ribs. They're my most favorite meat ever. If I was ever to commit a capital crime for which I would be granted a last meal, it would be barbecue lamb ribs, wild rice and creamed peas. Now, so this is about 10 or 12 years old, but this shows the consumption of different proteins by the American population over time. So basically the last 100 years. And so we can see beef and chicken and pork. Those are usually the big three. Those are the ones you're gonna see, but I wanted a graphic. So I picked a little older one because it's still tracked veal, lamb and turkey. And so you can see which three get the most sales and which three get fewer sales. So if we're looking for some more recent data, and this just pulls the big three, broilers that's chicken has surpassed beef and pork and is now the main protein in the American diet at about 90 pounds per person per year. And so when we're looking at what are we selling? What are our customers eating? I love lamb. I have always loved lamb. I think it's travesty that Americans eat so little of it, but when I'm looking at trying to market, I'm not gonna sell as much lamb as I am the other proteins. And so when you're looking at a marketing plan, particularly if you have a multi-species operation, where is your best bang for your buck? Where are you gonna be most successful at direct marketing? It's probably in these big three. So how many customers do I need? If I'm trying to market a certain amount of product. And so I went ahead and pulled this graph together and just used some numbers for my operation. So if I'm marketing beef, I get about 500 pounds of retail meat per animal. So when I put together a quarter, they're getting about 110, 125 pounds of meat. Let's say I have 10 steers that I'm gonna market this year. If the average person per that chart eats 65 pounds per year, I'm gonna, in order to market my 5,000 pounds of beef, I'm gonna need 77 customers. So if I have a family of four, you know, that's four of those 77. So families are often a better marketing avenue than single customers. Chicken. We sell our chickens about four pounds. I like a bigger chicken. So we go with about four pounds. And this year we're gonna do about 400 birds. And per capita consumption is 90 pounds of chicken per year. So I only have to sell to 18 people to sell all of that chicken. Pork, we get about 130 pounds of retail meat per animal. If I have 10 pigs, but 50 pounds, I need 26 people. And then look at this last one with lamb. We have about 40 pounds of retail meat. We tend to go for a little smaller carcass on our lambs. And then if we have 60 weathers that I'm gonna try and market this year, and the average American eats less than a pound of lamb per year, I need to find 2400 customers that will each eat less than a pound of lamb per year. So when you're looking at marketing, how many customers do I need to reach? How many people do I need to have in order to market the products that I'm producing? This gives you a little bit different way of looking at it rather than, okay, if I've got 10 steers and I can sell them for this much, how much money am I gonna make? That's the tempting way to go. That's kind of the easy route and think about the money that we need to make. But in order to make that money, we have to sell it to people. So how many people are gonna be consuming this in order to market in this avenue? And so the old saying is you don't wanna overrun your headlights. So I would not start marketing 70 steers when you've never sold beef before. It's gonna take a lot of customers and you're gonna have to build that base very quickly. It's just really hard to do. So how do I find a customer? So this picture here is a Reuben pizza. So every night is pizza night, or every night is pizza night, every Friday night is pizza night in our house. It has been for 15 years. And so we make homemade pizza most of the time. And so this was a Reuben pizza that I had used a leftover corned beef, corned beef that I had corned myself from one of our briskets. And so similar to Isaac, I've been showing this process and talking about how easy it is to corned beef, all it takes is time. And then you get leftovers like this Reuben pizza. And so just another way to talk about how to use our foods and give customers ideas on what they can do with it. So how do we find customers? And I have the three Fs and the three Ws. So farmers markets, craft shows, the Pride of Dakota program is a way to do that. We got our start in farmers markets and I really recommend them as a good avenue for your start. It gets you selling a product. You can have the flashiest photographs, you can have the best website, SEO optimized up the wazoo, you're still not connecting with a customer. And so there's something about it, particularly in the upper Midwest with shaking someone's hand, answering their questions, giving them that personal touch that you can build fairly easily through the farmer's market. And so that's where I usually recommend people start. And then social media, Facebook and other social sites are a great way to keep communicating with those customers. But by and large, our customer base has not been found on social media. They've been found in person and they continue to build their relationship with us via social media. And so I have tried Facebook ads. I use them for different things and selling meat is not that successful with a Facebook ad. They need that element of trust. You are asking customers for the most part to shell out a large amount of money. Buying a quarter of beef from us is not cheap. And so they wanna know who they're buying from. They wanna be able to have that element of trust. And that happens face to face. And so we utilize social media and primarily on Facebook. And it's a good tool, but it's not our primary method of communication and trust building. And then lastly, there's a number of them now, farm to fork websites. You can kind of get last listing your firearm on every single one of them. So I usually suggest pick a couple to start with and maintain those avenues, those farm to fork website listings. And then the three W's, the website. Most people want to be able to preview. They want to look at what you do and where you do it before they have to talk to you. And so a website gives you a really great opportunity to connect with those people, show them who you are, show them where their food is coming from, show them what their food looks like. And anytime you have a website, you really want to focus on SEO optimization. Now I say that with having absolutely no clue how to do that. I pay someone to do that, who's far smarter than I am. And it's absolutely worth every penny. And so you want to be able to be found by your customers. If you Google ground beef or grass-fed ground beef, there's like 5,000 hits. You want to be in that first page. It's rare that people will go to a second, even rarer to go to a third page. And so you want to hit on that first page. Again, I say that and I have no idea how to do it, but find someone who does and give them free meat to do it for you. And then there are wholesale avenues. We've wholesaled to both grocery stores and food co-ops with varying degrees of success. My advice with wholesale is have some agreements in writing, both for your production and that they will buy. We've been caught to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, where we had kept animals back, where we had purchased additional ones to finish, and they didn't buy anything. So once bit and twice shy, right? So get those agreements, no matter how trusting and promises that they make you, you're out the money if it falls through. So get those agreements, have something in writing, it protects both of you. And then lastly, word of mouth, buy, fire. Word of mouth is the most effective. I do not, like I said, buy Facebook ads to sell our meat. I don't pay Facebook to do that, I pay our customers. So we focus right now on bulk meat. And so every spring, and it opens March 1st, I will create a Google form, very simple to do. And I list all of our products and the customers can say how much they want. So they can say type in 15 and then in whole chickens, they can put in the number of 15 or turkeys too. And they can select either a half or a whole hog or two hogs. And then we do quarters, halves and holes of beef. And then lamb, I do a whole, a half, and then I do a lamb sampler, similar to Isaac, it lets people sample it and see if they like it. It's a lower cost entry, lower risk for them. And so I do a sampler, but just with lamb. And so I do that. And then the last question on that Google form says how did you hear about us? And they put the name of the person that recommended us to them. And then I send that customer who recommended us a free gift. So just the other day I put one in the mail. And this year it's a spice mix that I made, well actually two spice mixes that I made in our commercial kitchen. One for beef and one for lamb, pork and chicken. And I sent that to this customer and said, thank you for sharing what we do. And we really appreciate it. I wrote a handwritten thank you note and sent it to that customer who had recommended us to not just one, but two other people who then ended up ordering. And so word of mouth, I always like to say I pay my customers to advertise for us. I don't pay for advertising. It's by far the best way. And this is an original quote from me. So write it down. Darryl, you can write this down. When making big plans, dreaming about the farm, I do that often. The guiding question needs to be, how many customers can you afford to piss off? You can build a big dream and you think we're gonna launch and we're gonna have a hundred, whatever it is. Can you afford to anger that many people? Cause you're gonna make mistakes. Your butcher's gonna make mistakes. I had to deliver Easterhams one year when we were doing the buying club and Easterham was a big deal. And they left my hands in the smoker too long and I had to wait for NDSU to release them. And it was a nightmare because these hands were getting delivered to customers. And so you're gonna have mistakes. There's gonna be errors. And how you handle that determines if they remain your customer or not. And so there's just things as organized as you can be that are out of your control, like with a butcher. So how many customers can we afford to make a mistake with? And that's how you start a new enterprise or how you start even marketing meat in general. So how do you grow your business? And so this is a picture of steak night every day or every time we bring beef home or our beef home, we take a steak sample, we sample some different steaks and that's the traditional first night. So the first way that we grow our business is you under promise and you over deliver. So on that chart that I showed you, I said we get about 500 pounds of retail meat per animal for beef. And so divide that into a quarter, it's about 125 pounds. But what I tell our customers is they will get about a hundred pounds. And so then when they get 115 to 125, then it looks like more, right? I got more than what I was supposed to get, I got extra. And so you wanna under promise and over deliver. We tell people that our whole chickens will be three and a half to four pounds because you are gonna have a couple smaller ones. And so we don't want them to be a surprise. You said we were gonna have four pound chickens and I got a three and a half pound chicken. So under promise, over deliver. And when we market our meat, I do a flat rate on everything except for turkey. So why do you do that? Everybody else Annie is selling per hanging weight. Everybody else is selling per pound. It is exhausting to tell people what a hanging weight is and why the hanging weight is not the pounds that they're gonna get in their box. So after doing this for a number of years, we went to a flat rate and it's on our website. You can go see what I charge, it's no secret. Because then customers can plan and well, it'll cost you about $450. And then they get a bigger steer and suddenly it's $600. And that was not what they had thought it was gonna be. So we've got 12 years of data. We know what our animals are gonna hang. We know what we're gonna get back in a box. We know what we're gonna put together as a quarter and a half. I'm not often wrong. And when we under promise and over deliver, we can do that. And often what we'll do to minimize that variance that you'll get in some of your finished animals is I'll take a group over and then I'll bring them back and I'll split everything. So if you've got a bigger steer and in that carcass, we got 65 pounds of ground beef. And the other carcass was a little smaller and we only got 45 pounds. I will put both of those together and we'll split them down the middle. And so that minimizes some size differences in those finished animals that you might experience. We don't have a lot so much anymore. Like I said, we've been doing this for 12 years. I pretty much know what I'm gonna get out of an animal. But it just helps minimize that and then it allows your customers to plan budget for what you're gonna give them. And here's a bunch of our eggs. And the key to growing your business is not necessarily to find more customers. It's to sell the customers you have more products. We call eggs the gateway drug. It's a cheap way to enjoy our food, to try us out. There is a huge difference between farm raised eggs in taste, texture, color, not shell color, yolk color, compared to a standard grocery store type egg. And so we sell our eggs for four bucks a dozen. When you taste our eggs and there's a difference and wow, we really tell a difference. We eat more of your eggs than we did of regular eggs. It's marketing. We don't, eggs will never be a center-prize enterprise for us, you just aren't gonna make enough money on them. Our goal is always to break even on eggs because it's the gateway drug to the rest of our products. And so what the customer thinks when they eat these amazing eggs, is that, wow, if the eggs are this much different, their lamb must be better than anything I've tried or their beef must be better or their pork or their chicken. And so sell those same customers more products. And we've been building our beef herd over years. I started with one half or 10 years ago. You're never gonna get rich quick in the beef business. I'll just tell you that, direct market beef business. When you have, start with one cow. So now that I've built it up, last year was the first year that we offered our grass finished, 100% forage fed, beef to our customers. And so for the 11 previous years, we had been recommending two other ranches, the ranch in similar ways as we do, and direct market their beef. We've been recommending their beef. Our customers have been eating their beef. And so I said to John, like, I don't know if our, I don't know if we're gonna sell any beef because our customers have been buying from our friends and I don't wanna take business away from them, but I do have these steers that we've gotten to the point we've have enough to sell. And so as it turned out, they were just waiting, they were just waiting to buy beef from us. And we were sold out of beef within a week. And so to our same customers, we have customers who will order every single protein from us and they'll tell their friends, like, oh, if you want chicken, this is where I get my chicken. If you want beef, this is where I get my beef. And so they're the ones who will recommend us, but you can add on items to your business and your customers will buy them. They are absolutely looking for more things to buy from you. And then lastly, have your customers recommend their friends. And so I like to say that our customers select themselves. I don't go out and look for customers. They come looking for me. I love this. I love this one. I don't spend a whole lot of money on advertising. These are the spice mixes that I gave to our recommending customers this year. But these are customers who know how this works. So back in the day, when I would advertise, when I would push, expand, try and get more customers, there's a lot of education that has to happen. They have to understand that I am not gonna hold all of their proteins until they're ready. It says on the website, it says in the newsletters that they get, you will get your chicken in July and August because I do not have enough freezer space to hold onto your chicken until your beef gets here. And so they get their chicken in July and August. It says when they're getting their beef. It says when they're getting their pork. It says when they're getting their lamb. I will send them an email, particularly with our pork customers. Our pork customers are the only ones that get to do custom work, mainly because the beauty of pigs, you can make 5,000 different things out of pigs and they are all delicious. So our pigs are all done under custom and the customer pays the butcher for processing. I will then pick up that meat and I will deliver it to them. Then they pay me for the animal. And so that allows them to get exactly what they want out of their pork. I have a customer who wants to cure his own bacon. So he wants the bellies cut out, but he doesn't want them brined or smoked. I have another customer who does a lot of hunting and he wants to make his own sausage. So he wants half his pig ground into ground pork so he can make sausage. I'm not gonna deal with all that with the butcher. They're gonna deal with the butcher on that by themselves. And so when your customers recommend their friends, they know how this works and they will coach their friends through this. I don't have to coach them through this. They're gonna share recipes with their friends. They're gonna share cooking techniques with their friends. I don't have to answer all those questions. So using our customers to recommend us to their friends allows them to recommend their friends to us. These are people who understand how this is gonna work. That they are gonna meet me in a parking lot and we are gonna exchange meat and money similar to a drug deal. That's how this works. And so I love it. I love that customers recommend us and they teach their friends and their family members how this works. So how do we communicate? What are important things when we're communicating with these beloved customers? The first one is engage. We wanna engage with customers. We wanna tell them what's going on on the fire. And so this is my youngest daughter. She bought a milk cow. So that's her cow, Bess. And that is her heifer calf from last spring, Brunhilda. And so if you have kids, use them. They're excellent marketing tools. I know someone who shamelessly uses his granddaughter to sell meat and it works. Use them. People love to see kids. They love to see kids doing things in agriculture. Tell your story, engage with your customers. When you are trying to sell meat, do not put and contact us for your grass-fed beef with a picture of a baby calf like this because while you and I as producers understand that baby cows grow up and we eat them. Your customers generally don't and it's unsettling, shall we say, for them to realize that they will be eating a baby calf. And so when I am marketing lamb, I do not post pictures of fuzzy lambs. I post pictures of meat. When I am marketing beef, chicken, I do not show cute little pictures. I show meat. And a word about that is use your own pictures. Do not pull pictures of lamb chops off the internet. Do not pull pictures of chicken, no matter how beautiful they are. Use your own meat, use your own pictures, even if they're not as high quality. If you really want high quality photos, hire someone to style and photograph your food, but don't pirate pictures off the internet. And you wanna support your customers. You wanna give them ideas like Isaac said with recipes. You wanna help them that know that they can do it. So this is some corned beef. And you post a picture to the link to the recipe and tell them that it was the most amazing corned beef you've ever had, you didn't know, you didn't know it was that easy. They can do it too. So you wanna provide them that support, that encouragement that they can do it. And then lastly, you wanna educate. And so you wanna tell them what's happening. You wanna tell them, answer their questions. And often a question we often get is, will you still get eggs if you don't have a rooster? Yes, yes you will, you will still get eggs. And so it's amazing the questions that people will ask, but you may have to like slow the eye roll cause they don't know. When we were doing the vegetable CSA, this is one of my favorite customers don't know stories. When we were doing the vegetable CSA, I had taken a picture of the potato patch and it was just covered in little purple flowers. And I said, as soon as these flowers kind of dry up and fall off, then that means there's little baby potatoes underneath and we can harvest those and you'll have new potatoes in your share. That'll take a couple of weeks. And so a customer emailed me back and she said, Annie, I didn't know potatoes had a plant part. And my first thought was, oh, for dumb. But if you think about it, where would a consumer have ever seen a potato plant? They don't sell them in the grocery store. It's not like carrots or beets that are sometimes sold with the tops on. They would have never seen that. And so they will have what may appear to you and I who are in the business to be a dumb question. No, you don't need a rooster to get eggs. They don't know that. And so it's a question and they want to have some understanding. So you want to educate them, invite them out to the farm. If they want to come see, if they want to walk the pastures, if they want to do whatever, bring them out to the farm. So a few words about pricing. Like I said, our stuff's on the website. You can look at it if you want. A lot of times we want to sell a lot, so we'll mark it down. And my word of caution about that is that if they came to you because of a low price, they will leave you because of a lower price. And so to really build those customer relationships, you don't want to be the cheapest out there because then your customers are loyal to a price. They are not loyal to a producer. And secondly, we want to price fairly. And what I mean by fairly is I want to price my product so it's fair to both me and the customer, particularly among like grass-based pastured meats. People want to throw a premium on it. Well, it's special. Well, what does it cost you to produce it? They can't tell me, they don't know. I always say our farm runs on three things. Electric fence, five gallon buckets and Annie's Excel spreadsheets. I can tell you exactly what it costs us to produce each of our proteins. And so we price that fairly for our customers because we want to keep them coming back. We want to be their protein supplier. Many of our customers are families. They don't have a ton of disposable income. So we want to be respectful of that. We want to honor the commitment that they're making with their pocketbook to support our small farm. And in doing that, we want to give them a fair price. But also I need a fair price or I can't keep doing this. I can't keep feeding them. And so make sure you know your prices, know where you're at because you need to be getting a fair price and so does your customer. And when it comes to customers, listen to them but you don't have to do everything they tell you nor should you. A success story with listening to customers. So our grass-fed beef customers said, God, we really just love the ground beef but we wish there was more. Like are you gonna have like just some ground beef bundles available so we can add more ground beef to what we've already bought? And at the time I didn't have any burger available. And so I said to John, like I think we need to provide some grass-fed beef bundles because I think just ground beef like 10, 25, 50 pound bundles where people can add more ground beef. And so that's what we're offering this summer. And then with that, I'll put together a little recipe booklet, Annie's Top 10 Ground Beef Recipes and so people can try new things or revisit an old favorite. So that's a success story of doing what our customers have told us to do. Like we want ground beef bundles. And then I had another customer who said, you guys should raise pheasant. I mean, lots of people would buy pheasant. You should raise pheasant. Well, we raised a ton of chickens. It's the same equipment basically to raise pheasants. Like we could do it. So I said, well, how many would you buy? Oh, I'd buy six. You who thinks I should do this would only buy six. Then I'm not going to do it. So listen to your customers, but don't do everything they tell you. And then there's going to come a time where you're going to need to raise prices. And my advice there is do it once and put it high enough that you can leave your prices there for a while. So what have we found this past year? Feed prices are up. Well, I have two classes of protein, poultry and pork that require grain. And the price went up this year and it went up on both of them. And we explain that to our customers, this is why. Because feed prices have increased such and such percent, we have had to increase our prices. I had to increase the price on our beef because our processor went to all shrink wrap and that jumped the price per pound for processing. So customers are generally pretty accepting when you tell them why and then you leave it there for a while. Like eggs, for example, we've been at four bucks for eggs for eight years. Shortly after we moved here, we went to four bucks. We've never changed. So it doesn't matter if eggs in the store are 99 cents, eggs in the store are 599, we're still four bucks and we will remain four bucks until we can't. So customers are generally, like I said, pretty forgiving when you explain it to them and then you leave it there for a while as long as you can. We have never raised the price on lamb. Ever, it's always been the same. We're still making plenty of money on lamb. So it stayed, I don't need any more money. Other lamb producers in the state, I know are charging more and I'm assuming they're getting it, but we've remained the same. And lastly, thank you for listening. My name is Annie Carlson. Our website is morningjoyfarm.com. That's our logo there. We have a big sign out on our road, but has this logo, Morningjoy Farmer Kitchen. So people know where we're at because Google is sketchy. Sometimes it gets you here and sometimes it gets you four miles down the road. So I'm going to end sharing my screen. All right, well, thank you, Annie, very much. That you hit a lot of things in your presentation and a lot of good points to mentioning just even the point of listening to your customers and not giving them maybe everything that they want, depending on what that might be, but might turn into something really great too and some new value added products or things like that as well. On the other thing I wanted to comment on was that you list the prices on your website. And I say that because I'm like, how many times that if the price is not easily accessible and you have to contact the person that they don't have that relationship, does that turn them away a little bit? Like sometimes like, oh, well, I wish I could just see the price, but now I have to message them for a price list. Oh yeah, they're not going to do it. I'm even shopping for something just today. And like one website was like, contact us for price. And I was like, hard pass. I don't have this kind of time. So, and then we always put on our website when the processing, when these animals are going to be processed, when they're going to be available. So people can go back and reference that information. And so when they say like, well, I thought it was $600, but I checked your website and it was only 500, they know. And so that information's out there for everybody. It doesn't change. They can go back. That's another question I don't have to answer when the information's on the website. So when you increase those prices, do you kind of give them like a heads up? Like just when you know that I will increase that some such and such or? Yep. So I don't put it on the website because new customers will come to the website. What, when I explain the price increases is when I email our existing customers. So what happens prior to March 1st is I will update the website and I will create the new Google form. And then February 27th or 28th, I will send an email to all of our previous year's customers. And for the first week, they get exclusive access to that Google form. And so my returning customers get the first chance to order pork, which usually is what sells out the quickest for us. They get the first chance. Rarely will a new customer get pork the first year because my returning customers buy it all. And so that's another exclusive perk for being a faithful customer or returning customer is you get the chance to order first. So that's a good point is, you know, like rewarding your customers. And I guess I can open this up to Isaac too. What are, and you kind of hit some of those Annie and you can touch if there's any more and then Isaac, feel free to jump on too. But as far as that rewarding that customer, you know, giving them that first choice or that first whatever. Is there anything else that you might do for those customers that might help them repeat as for repeat customers? When we sold at the farmers market, we would sell eggs and meat and baked goods, the whole nine yards. And so we would do what I called the green egg giveaway. So we only had like two Americana hens at that time. So we only had a couple of green eggs a week. And I would bring like 40 dozen eggs, but one dozen would have a green egg in them. And people would line, there were other vendors who were selling eggs, but people would line up to buy eggs from us because of the chance of getting the green egg. And if you one, if you open and they would set their bags down and they'd open their eggs to see if they got the green egg. And if you got the green egg, you got a free pack of breakfast sausage, which cost us seven bucks. So for seven bucks a week, I had a line of people buying my eggs. Just only one customer got it. I only gave out one package of sausage a week, but it, everybody wanted a chance for it. And so it's not something you don't have to give that to every customer, but the opportunity. Like one of you will, et cetera. Sure. How about you, Isaac, anything you'd like to add? Just building off what Annie said with making sure to allow the people that have been loyal to you to come back and buy those products, give them first choice. In our experience, especially before we started selling the whole cuts, we would make sure to save a half or a whole depending on their buying preference for the people that had been buying from, especially for me, I still do some haves and whole carcasses to vets at the vet school back at K-State, but I know who's gonna buy and I make sure to allot myself the product that they're gonna want. I have a coworker that I worked with for a long time in undergrad. He always wants a half and it's all ground. And so I make sure to keep that in my mind because he's been loyal and he buys every single year. So rewarding that consistency is always a good idea. Yeah, those are, yeah, and just the, yeah, I just love hearing about like the unique ideas that people think of and yeah, just rewarding those people because it really does bring them back and it makes them feel special too, like, oh, they kept this for me and you're thinking about me. One more thing before I talk about, I wanna talk about ethnic markets and I'll let Travis have on for that too. But I also was wondering about you guys had mentioned land of Kansas, of course, Prada Dakota Crab shows. I wasn't really expecting you to say Crab shows but of course the farmers market. Outside of that, as far as like, kind of a continuing education or collaborating with other farmers and ranchers, are there like conferences or meetings that you like every year plan to go to, to meet new people, learn new things that might help other people either get started or continuing growing relationships? Oh, yes. The Northern Plains Sustainable Ag Society, and PSAS, npsas.org has a winter conference. That's usually the last full weekend in January and that's where John and I really found a lot of knowledge, a lot of support, a lot of good ideas. And then the North Dakota Grazing Lands Coalition is John and I are mentors in that organization now and they have tons of information. They have webinars and conferences and stuff throughout the year and they've been an excellent resource just to bounce ideas off of, to share. A lot of them are beef producers and so when they have customers who say, go, where can I get some good chickens? John and Annie. And so they will recommend customers to us because we have those other proteins. So those are my two favorite organizations. Any out of state or you kind of just stay within? The Moses Organic Conference, that's in La Crosse usually in February. I've been there quite a few times, also excellent. Grass-fed exchange is another one that we utilize quite a bit for resources and information. Okay. Isaac, do you guys tend to travel to different places? Not as much. A lot of our stuff is done through my family, like I said, it's very active in Kansas Farm Bureau. So we do a lot with, in the past and my father's on the committee for the Young Farmers and Ranchers, the state conference. And so we do a lot with that. And then like I said, we're big in the land of Kansas at this point, do a lot of work with them. We don't quite have the presence that Annie has in a lot of those organizations for sure. So going into Travis, feel free to hop on the ethnic market side. I don't know, Annie, I don't know if you dabble in that so you can feel free to mention that. And I know Isaac does. So I'm just kind of curious of how, I don't know, maybe how you get into those or what that looks like or how big of a business that is for your operation or all the things. Ours is minimal. So I'm gonna bow to Isaac on this one. All of our customers order the same way. Whether or not they're an ethnic customer, doesn't matter much to me. We tend, our customer base tends to be people who've lived other places and had access to good quality proteins and had relationships with farmers and ranchers. Then they come back to Bismarck or come back to North Dakota and they are searching out those same opportunities. So that's all I have to say about that. Isaac, take it away. For us, a lot of it has actually been through that word of mouth. A lot of the few people, because we're not super big into it, but we've had some exposure to it. They've just noticed our product online or people that, the one, the Albanian family that comes out processes the lamb every, I think I do two or three a year. They found us because they were friends with one of our customers. And so that word of mouth is really important in that side of things, especially, they just wanted to be able to process their own lamb not, since they process a young light carcass and smoke the whole thing. They didn't want to have to figure out all the inner workings of that. And so it was good to work with them on that especially. And I'm sure Travis has got a little more information on that, but that's been my experience with it. And your mileage might vary depending on where you're at. Sure, thanks guys for pointing that in the correct direction. And I think one of the things to keep in mind as we talk about all those proteins of beef, pork, lamb, goat, and also of our poultry is that one of the things where we have an opportunity in terms of more of the ethnic markets and more of our new Americans, if that's the correct ideas as we think of that is that lamb and goat is something that is particularly something that fits their culture, fits their ideas and fits what they want to do. And so there's an opportunity from that standpoint. Even as we think about it from, how Annie has talked about it in terms of just word of mouth is that from some of our previous functions and lectures is that that also kind of pulls together and bringing in a lot of new consumers. And so Annie, I really, really appreciate your thoughts in terms of just offering either the free sausage or even the recipes and the spices. I think that's a tremendous idea that people can look at what spices might go with things. And so no matter what kind of meat or what protein that you design as something that you can feel as home base, that's something where you can be able to say, you know what, I could have control to help you make a better eating experience. And so I think Isaac and Annie both did a great job in terms of presenting saying, you know what, let's be on your team, right? And so that's the big picture of today's in terms of customer relationships and building that trust model is that if you can be able to provide a recipe or provide whether that was, I saw, you know, initially there in some of Annie's and even as we think about this of different, like if it was beef shanks or lamb shanks or the pork shoulder in a Boston butt of saying, hey, this is a rub that can work with you. That's something that I think that you guys, you know, can cheaply be able to build a trust and build that relationship of saying, you know what, you know, this pork shoulder might have cost you $12, $15, whatever that may be, but here's a rub that truthfully only cost me 53 cents to put together. And then you say, you know what, they feel as though they've gotten that kind of game plan to know what they're doing when they leave because I think one of the things that we can continue in terms of customer relationships and that success is trying to be able of what the meal's gonna be, right? Was that very Annie, you know, when they leave you, if that's the case is saying, you know, I don't want you to leave with just, you know, this sampler package. I want to provide some options to say, this is something that can be beneficial to make your meal lovely on a Tuesday evening for your family of four or five or six or whatever that may be. And so I think that's a really, really fun spot that you guys have punched on and given some credence to when you think about just the relationship building I'm saying, let's just not just sell meat, but let's also just make a meal. Annie, is that the correct approach? Yeah, and, you know, most people can figure out what to do with ground beef. Sometimes we just get stuck in a rut. So offering them, you know, like me would put together this, Annie's top 10 recipes and then those harder cuts of meat, like a flank steak or a skirt steak. What do I do with this? Most of them have never ordered it in a restaurant or they're not sure how to cook it. So I have an amazing steak salad recipe and it's one I share this time of the year when people are starting to eat more salads and that steak has been haunting them in their freezer since last fall, just giving them options. And this is a fun thing, a fun recipe to use, particularly with lamb customers. They need a lot of support because it's new and most people did not grow up like I did, feasting on lamb at every opportunity, those poor people. Anyway, they need help. What do I do with it? What's the best way to cook it? And so for John's birthday last year, we grilled lamb chops back in November and I posted about that. And like lamb chops, the original fast food, three to four minutes on a side and you're done. My quick question here as we kind of continue through this and come closer to the end is my question for both Isaac and Annie is again, I think the theme and truthfully some of the research that we have is that trust is extremely important. And so one of the things, no matter what that is depending on the protein is that it's not knowing who your consumer is and knowing where that food comes from, right? And so being able to build that and build that trust. And so we see that in relation to just some research of whether that was, you know, people could put label claims on those, but I sincerely believe in one of the things of why Lydia and I have helped to build some of these small farms extension approaches is that we have the opportunity to continue to build that trust and to build that relationships. And so that's why this function is so great for us. And so what could you say? I'm gonna give this one to Isaac first and then I'll let Annie follow. But what did it, have you felt that it's so important in terms of building that trust of what you've done right or what you do in your production practices to ensure that they're gonna have a quality eating experience? Isaac, the floor is yours. A lot of it has been just providing the recipes and some advice, cooking advice, especially I'm big into smoking meat on the grill and grilling. And so teaching people about how to properly do that as you witnessed some last semester in the sheep production class I helped with. But even moving past that point, some of the trust and other aspects like that we've built with our operation is supporting local operations. One thing we do is my parents will support a plaque at the local county fair and support a 4-H'er and I'll do the same. Mine is the intermediate showman. Go out and support your local organizations like that moving past the meat. It's good to get yourself out there and expose yourself to clientele that might not see you otherwise and especially to tie yourselves into the 4-H and FFA activities. Cause that's, I mean, that's the whole reason I'm in the sheep game honestly. My family's operation is an overgrown 4-H project. We started out with two and now we're sitting around 100. So I think that's a good place to start with and then especially going back to the meat side of things, developing those meat products, getting to know your customers like Annie said and just taking advice and having that open dialogue. Annie, how do we build trust and continue with our customer relationship so that we know that we have repeat customers? Well, anytime that you email the farm and ask a question, I am the one who answers it. When you call the farm, I'm the one who takes the call or calls you back. I'm the one who posts the recipes. I'm the one who will message you back. I'm the one who will pick up your meat and work with the butcher. I'm the one who selects the animals that are going to be on your plate. I'm really glad that you guys talked about finishing and how important that is. Nothing ruins an eating experience more than bad meat and customer service is not gonna change the quality of meat on the plate. And so you wanna pick quality animals and you wanna select for quality animals in your breeding programs. We have culled ruthlessly, ruthlessly to maintain our high standards. We could have gotten our flock and herd and all that much bigger, much quicker, but we knew that we were gonna have to make some tough decisions at some point and it was easier to do it when it was smaller. And so don't be afraid to take a hard look at your animals. Keep track of those females. Who are those females that are putting quality carcasses on the rail? Walk in and look at your carcasses. Ask your butcher to come in. Ask your butcher for his opinion because mine will give it to me and he's blunt. And so make sure you're getting a quality product and then put your face on it. I'm the one who'll deliver it to them. I'm the one who'll help carry it to their car. I'm the one who will talk with their kids and that's that personal relationship. Some farms that we know that have gotten bigger, they've gotten interns and employees and you're talking to different people. You've got one person running the social media, you've got one person doing the buying club, you've got one person doing the restaurant deliveries and you don't get that consistency in service. And so it's easier for us to have one person who does it and that would be me. Well, I just want to thank both of you so much. I just had one more comment of, I think it after listening to Annie and saying, many times after 12 years of doing this, we figured out this and this and that there are mistakes that are going to be made and you just got to figure that out and just get out there basically is the biggest thing. And then that word of mouth, that was taught so many times that that is a very big piece here too that we can't forget. So if there's something else, I do again want to thank you both for jumping on and I appreciate having you both and we'll probably see you and have you again. So if there's something else, thanks again and have a good night.