I sell a portion of what I grow for a fair price and the rest of the stuff falls on the ground and rots!
Fortunately, I’m retired and have other sources of income, but I spend a huge amount of time working on the farm. I enjoy the physical activity but I really need the farm to make a big fat profit for my mental health! Although we have a long way to go, sales improve each year. If we can figure out how to grow and sell the Apples, my dream will come true. Its been a long road - we planted our first blueberry and blackberry in 1982.
Seth, I may be wrong, but I took what blueberry said to mean that they would rather let their fruit fall to the ground and rot than to sell it for less than what they believe is a fair retail price. That they could handle a higher volume of sales than they have been drawing.
You are generally correct, but we do not choose to let the fruit fall on the ground rather than drop the price. Unfortunately, its just about impossible to sell 10,000 pounds of blackberries or blueberries to our U-pick customers over a 6 week period of time at ANY price. When we were younger, more energetic and grew a lot more, we sold at various farmer’s markets and wholesale. Now that we are older, our focus is 100% sold from the farm - mostly U-pick. This eliminates a lot of the complexity that used to drive us crazy.
Blue, the UP farmers here have gone to establishing websites, in order to market their fruit and
letting customers know what’s ready to pick. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to
try the same thing.
You are right about the Internet stuff. Our facebook page and website really help a lot. Its amazing how powerful these tools are. We now have close to 1400 facebook fans. Its exciting to watch our customer count and sales improve each year. However, we still have a very long way to go to hit the sales targets that will make all the hard work worth while.