Pushing Poultry in a Closed Market

What Works When They Ain't Flying Out of the Freezer

My youngest brother came out to California recently, accompanied by his lovely wife, and spent several days on the land in what I like to call a captive audience…mostly because they were staying with us. I had several days where they had to listen to me talk about the philosophies I hold to when it relates to food freedoms and how food is pumped full of chemicals and mass-produced with no thought to the health of the population; at the same time he also watched the ideas planted in his wife’s head start to take root and I think he realized that at some point soon he was going to be watering a veggie garden and possibly raising chickens.

I later received a text showing a whole bunch of herbs they purchased for growing. Kiss your already meager free time goodbye Jason, bwahahahahahaha!

There is a 13-year difference in our ages, and due to life circumstances we haven’t spent any significant amount of time together in the past 20 years or so beyond a couple of holidays and some weekends here and there. In the time we were together the question of what jobs I had worked between the years popped up and I started listing them off…where did the time go? What happened to working at Cold Stone as a late teen? Or bankruptcy appraisals in the hollers of Kentucky in my early 20’s? As I approach my 40s in the next couple of years (not “weeks” auto-fill! Rude.) I have the leisure of looking back on my longest stint of a career: Sales.

In the corporate sales world, there is an expectation that growth will happen with every quarter, and if it doesn’t then the search for a new job is in the future some poor sucker who was told he was part of a corporate “family”... man, I hated working in corporate sales. It is a soulless 8-hour (or more) prison where the anxiety and pressure to perform can cause someone to betray the very essence of what makes them the person they are. I am fortunate to now be in a sales position that asks that I build relationships and allow my intelligence and knowledge of technical products to do the selling for me, and I don’t have to increase year over year. This model of sales ideally laid the foundation for how I approach marketing my poultry products in that I must be honest with myself in my expectations for engagement from the community, and I must acknowledge that selling a more expensive product into an already struggling economy is going to be difficult and trying.

If the last statement is discouraging to some who are attempting to sell poultry or healthy, farm-raised products, it is okay, I understand. The cards are stacked so heavily against the small farmer and in favor of the big producers who have the backing of the state, laws, and corporations, that it is rare for people to attempt to do it at all. The truth is that even when big producers partner with Tyson’s, Foster Farms, or any of the others, it is just as likely to end in eventual failure when the corporations leave the area and the farmer is left holding the bill for everything they built to appease their barons.

Bawck Bawck - Who’s there? - Not your farm, ha ha ha…*quietly sobs*

I desire to make it work and show others in my community that we don’t have to settle for corporate-raised garbage while also abiding by the USDA’s arbitrary hand-binding laws. I don’t mind the extra work or the trials and errors, if nothing else it helps me improve my character and shows my two daughters to never succumb to tyrants.

If you are just starting I can almost guarantee that there will be a couple of years of learning the product, and also seeing deductions from the bank account as you build your processing capabilities. Those years are formative in that they allow you to start practicing how to talk about what you do to friends and family: historically the easiest people to start supporting your small farm endeavors and the ones that you feel the most comfortable speaking to. Tell them about the struggles you have had, ranging from overly aggressive meat bees that coordinate their attacks like little kamikaze pilots; or tackling a 50lb turkey and finding that it put you in an arm bar and Joe Rogan is on the side of the pasture flipping out about the speed with which you were taken down.

I have yet to regret opening up to friends and family. People love hearing about the trials and tribulations that I have gone through as I have slowly become more informed and practiced; they love even more when I explain how it influenced me the following year to do something different to avoid the problem, like learning jiu-jitsu. 

With that said, it is an odd feeling to talk to people about something that you won’t feel like you truly know yet. Give yourself a little grace. The percentage of people who are farming in a way that is in harmony with nature are likely numbered in the low hundreds; yet the desire from people within your community to learn from someone like you and in-person exists. By all means: read the books; pour through the forums; listen to the podcasts of others and their trials, but the skinny is that if you are the type of person to make that leap into learning and are willing to make mistakes, well THAT is what makes you the best candidate to chase the dream and teach others. We either must be fearless in our capacity to fail time and again, or at least fake it till we make it.

I would also argue that your reason for farming in a regenerative way and raising food for your community must be based on the burning desire to change the industrial way of farming while also supporting family, friends, and neighbors with truly wholesome food. That passion for food equality will draw the consumer to you because they are now able to put a face to a once faceless product. It turns you into someone they can believe in because you know your products and you are able to point out the discrepancies in mass-produced food.

That trust in you and the mission is going to be the most important reason they will buy from you instead of the grocery store. From the perspective of the consumer the type of people who are needed to farm small are the ones whose desires most closely align with the ideals and dreams of those who live in environments where they either cannot, or are not allowed, to raise their own food and animals. The statement I hear often is “You are living our dream”. That alone helps me to remember why I yearn for this lifestyle to work out, because eventually it may empower the very people I am feeding to take the leap.

I acknowledge that I am speaking from an elevated position in comparison to many others like me. I live 5 miles outside of a town that is 250,000 large in population. I live a couple of miles from an organic feed mill, where buying by tonnage is extremely inexpensive and allows me to be so much more competitive against the big producers. Lastly, I live on a piece of land with my in-laws that they paid for decades ago. To call myself blessed would be a disservice to understatements.

Yet I still have to sell all of these chickens and turkeys; and they ain’t flying out of the freezer into waiting customers arms by themselves!

My initial thought to market frozen packages of deliciousness was to make something eye catching and place it in a demographic where people are most likely to buy something natural and locally grown. Not a single hit on the hand-crafted chicken signs placed in affluent neighborhoods where people walk all the time. Yep, just gonna’ shove that little voice of doubt deeper into my brain…there we go, tuck in ya booger.

 After that I tried quantity of views over supposed wealth of neighborhood by placing awesome fliers downtown in eateries where people are likely to be sitting, which will give them more time to eyeball my art and give me a ring. Never heard a peep from anyone regarding how to get some of the best tasting chicken in California. That little voice is starting to get louder and climb out of the hole I had placed it in.

Lastly I went and hung up fliers around parks that were frequented by families whom I was sure would want to feed their squealing little mini-thems with wholesome chickens and turkeys; alas, it seems that dino-nuggets will continue to reign supreme on the dinner table. My brain door is kicked open as doubt flamboyantly presents itself in what is best described like Robin Williams screaming “HERE I AM!”

It was discouraging! This was supposed to be my big year! All the right marketing attempts were made and nothing seemed to work. Was it the art style on the flyer? Is my product overpriced? Are people so grossed out by a whole chicken that they don’t want to even try it?

Or…did I let my ego get the better of me and I forgot the thing that made me successful in my day job: perseverance in building that relationship. 

Several groups of people have come out to the farm this year to see how we homestead, and every time someone has come out and I am available I have developed a relationship and a connection with them because of what we do and because I know my product beak to feet. I know the terrible quality of my competitor’s product and I can list several reasons why mine is better. I can bring the potential customer to understand the amount of work that it takes to produce a truly healthy and happy animal from hatch to hatchet*.

All the flyers and signs were the same manner of advertising that has made Americans so wearily wary of any kind of promotion, and rightly so. Anyone can print up anything and it is no more legitimate than the ads on radio and TV where they speed their voices up five times the normal rate to get through the nasty legal jargon or drug side effects. Now more than any time in the past several decades people yearn for community and connections with where their food comes from, and while it is frustrating not to reach people easily, I also can’t blame them for putting the blinders on when they see some flyer made up on printer paper and hung on a pole or in a window.

Education, followed by encouragement from friends and family, and strengthened with community, will be the NPK needed to grow your business. I am sure others will have success where I have failed and more power to you! Just like nature, some plants fail whereas others find the right environment. It takes strength to fail time and again because you don’t quit trying, and in a culture where the only thing typically shown is the success of others, it can be grueling to keep going and growing. I encourage you to reach for the canopy because someday that sun will hit your face, and you will be glad you didn’t whither. Flower Power!

*We don’t hatchet our poultry, we use constraint cones, it just sounded too good to not keep it in.