Marketing is an ever-present concern for farmers and growers. You spend so much quality time preparing your soil, planting your seeds and tending your crops – and you need to ensure you set aside more quality time to sell the literal fruits of your labor. From the recent Southern Nursery Association...

In today’s climate of immediate customer reactions, many business owners are taking a fresh approach to customer service and follow-up, much of which begins before a visitor even arrives on-site. Establishing good customer relations always begins with a connection between buyer and seller. While in ...

Pressing onward at Brace’s Orchard One generation ago, there were 80 fruit growers in Luzerne County, PA. Today there are just two, and Brace’s Orchard, in Dallas, PA, is one of them. As an eighth-generation fruit grower, Paul Brace has seen many changes in the industry, but he and his family remain...

Nearly 40% of 6,000 Central Virginia farmers are women, a trend USDA officials say compares with the rest of the country. One of them is Appomattox lavender farmer Bonnie Swanson, who presides over Evergreen Lavender Farm with husband, Ken. She shares her fragrant swath of land near the place the Ci...

COLUMBUS, OHIO – Many growers like to think in terms of size, be that length of rows, the square footage of hoop houses – or the eight acres of trade show at the annual gathering sponsored by AmericanHort in Ohio. This year’s iteration was Cultivate’19. Taking place from July 13 – 16 at the Greater ...

A farm founded on faith and hard work five generations ago by a family near the central Virginia community of Rustburg stays competitive in the agriculture market today by wedding tradition with contemporary marketing strategies and products for today’s consumers hungry for the back-to-the-land expe...

Competition. Even farm markets are feeling the pinch as more consumers want to know where their food comes from and communities across the country add their own markets. The USDA’s most recent National Count of Farmers Market Directory reports an increase of over 4,000 such markets nationwide in the...

If you sell anything, you may intuitively know the basics of marketing: branding your product, articulating why people should buy from you, having appropriate pricing, knowing your target customer and figuring out how they will find out about your farm. To make things more streamlined, there are als...

Surveys suggest that an increasing percentage of greenhouse growers are utilizing biocontrols to combat pest issues. An informal survey of New York state growers found that 40% were using insecticides alone to control fungus gnat. Sixty percent, however, were using some form of biocontrol, including...