Spurred by interest from their suburban neighbors, Pam and David Bosserd converted a significant part of their Michigan grain and livestock farm into vegetables. Now, farmstand sales of sweet corn, tomatoes and cucumbers add significant income to conventional corn, beans and wheat, thanks to an enthusiastic word-of-mouth network and farm tours for school children.

Two SARE grants have helped Pam achieve her goals of hiking farm profits and educating consumers. But, like any good entrepreneur, she continues to look for ways to improve her operation.

Pam and David have been raising and selling vegetables on their Marshall, Michigan, farm since 1989. That’s in addition to growing 1,500 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat, plus beef cattle.

A couple of years after Pam and David were married in 1989, Pam left her job as a chemical sales representative. That’s about when she started raising sweet corn and selling it off a wagon at the end of their farm drive.

Raised on a potato farm in Maine, she had experience growing and selling sweet corn before she left home to get a degree in plant and soil science from the University of Maine.

"I wanted to contribute to the farm," she said. "But I wasn’t real good with equipment. When they put me in the combine, I ripped the auger off."

She has proven that she is pretty good with vegetables and customers, however. From that modest start, the Bosserd’s specialty crop business has grown to 45 acres. They now raise 30 acres of irrigated sweet corn, 10 acres of pumpkins, and 5 acres of vegetables, everything from acorn squash to zucchini.

"We target the things that people don’t like to buy at the store," she said.

"It helped that we didn’t have huge start-up costs," Pam added. "David already had most of the equipment we needed and enough land to rotate the crops around."

He had started farming with his father in 1979 after receiving an agriculture degree from Michigan State University. He later earned a business degree from Nazareth College.

Knowledge and equipment from the conventional side of the farm – such as irrigation equipment and growing knowledge – has helped the direct marketing side succeed.

It also helped that their farm is on a busy road between Marshall and Battle Creek.

"About 1,500 cars a day go by here," Pam said.

As the business has grown, so have the demands on Pam’s and David’s time, however.

"I’d say David spends 50 to 60 percent of his time on the specialty crops," she added. He tills the ground, plants the sweet corn and pumpkins, sprays the crops, and irrigates the sweet corn with a small center pivot that does 15 acres at a setting.

The conventional side of the operation has one employee who helps plant, hauls manure and keeps Pam out of the combine as much as possible.

Pam says their biggest challenge isn’t producing or marketing, it’s keeping some family time together.

"Right now, we are in a growth phase, and we have got to deal with some of those issues," she said.

Another issue is finding good help.

Doug Crane, who is Pam’s brother and a former teacher, is joining the operation to manage a new greenhouse on the farm, used for bedding plants and to start tomatoes. The Bosserds have found that the flower market also provides high returns, so they will focus more energy there, along with other high-income vegetables, in the future.

They added one acre of picked and u-pick strawberries this year and will add another, as well as raspberries, in 2001.

"We are going to try and close the greenhouse one day a week," she said. "And if we can do that with the greenhouse, we’ll try to do it with the vegetable stand, too. We’ve typically been open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week most of the season." The greenhouse opens in May, and the season doesn’t end until November.

But even as they try to cut back on hours, the Bosserds are looking for more revenue streams.

The Bosserds not only believe that education is a key component of their direct marketing business, but they also think that it can help save the family farm by providing extra income from agri-tourism and educating future generations about agriculture.

A few years ago, they added a petting zoo to their vegetable market.

"We have farm animals because we want to teach kids what farming is really like," said Pam.

SARE provided a grant to help develop curriculum for school visits, hosted for a fee.

The curriculum is centered around answering the question "Where does our food come from?" with an emphasis on the fact that farmers touch our lives every day.

Along with the petting zoo, Pam constructed learning gardens, scavenger hunts and a corn maze to help children answer this question.

One learning garden features tomatoes, wheat, peppers, onions and cows and pigs to represent the origin of items on a favorite children’s food: pizza. The scavenger hunt allows children to learn about plants as they find flowers, vines and gourds in a pumpkin patch. And Pam posted colorful signs throughout a corn maze that connect farms with a variety of food and other products – from cookies to toothpaste.

The maze also introduces children to local agriculture with a Michigan map illustrating specific products raised throughout the state, such as dairy and beef cows in Upper Michigan and sheep and corn in the south. Pam has activities for teachers, too.

"The advantage of bringing school children to the farm will probably not show up in the next few years, but hopefully they will remember their experience when they get older," Pam said. "If it’s a positive experience for them, maybe they won’t see the farm as a place to complain about noise or smell when they are older."

Despite direct marketing challenges such as added labor needs, less family time during the busy season, legal issues in direct marketing and challenges of dealing with customers, the Bosserds continue to plow ahead with their alternative enterprise.

While future plans for the Bosserds include expanding direct marketing sales, there are obstacles to overcome with every increase.

"Right now we are running into more than we can handle," Pam said. "When demand goes up, that requires more labor in the field. It is not easy to get people to pick veggies."

So the Bosserds are expanding greenhouse production, since it seems to be easier to find help in the greenhouse. Pam anticipates that the Bosserd Farm of the future will focus on the flower and berry business and will maintain the same amount of acres in veggies and conventional crops.

Because a customer survey told them that consumers wanted to buy meat at the farm, the Bosserds are also exploring direct sales of frozen meat at their farm stand to complement their veggies.

"People were saying: ‘You’ve got the sweet corn, beans and potatoes, but where’s my meat?’" Pam recalled.

Pam and David have the steers but lacked the know-how to process and sell meat directly to consumers.

That changed when they attended North Central SARE’s marketing conference in November 1999, where Pam saw real-life examples of direct-market meat sellers and heard Neil Hamilton, a law professor at Drake University and author of The Legal Guide for Direct Farm Marketing.

"The SARE conference helped me get the confidence" to get a license, create a label and plan to sell meat at the farm, she added.

"Neil Hamilton’s legal issues session was very good," said Pam, "and so is Hamilton’s book. It answers a lot of questions and tells you the questions you need to ask your insurance company about liability. We also learned that marketing meat isn’t as complicated as everybody has been telling us. We think we can take that next step without a problem."

The Bosserds will sell meat in spring 2001.

The Bosserd Farm will also continue to educate children and their families about agriculture and take advantage of profits from "agritainment."

Results and contacts from SARE marketing grants. Search for marketing project abstracts at the national SARE project database at www.sare.org/projects/san_db_search.asp. Or contact NCR-SARE, 402-472-7081 or ncrsare@unl.edu for project listings and full printed reports, including the Bosserd producer grant report.

PDP Call for Proposals
Producer Projects Show Promising Preliminary Results
Reserve SARE Resources for Winter Meetings
Scholarships Available for Business Planning Course
Agricultural Smithsonian Exhibit: Coming to a Library Near You?
Educational CD-ROM on Alternative Marketing

These and many other producer grant projects will continue through the fall and winter and have reports available in early 2001. For more information on new or continuing producer grants, contact Schneider at 402-472-0809 or kschneider1@unl.edu