Farmer Spotlight: McCabe Family Farms
Joe grew up on his family farm and shortly after highschool, began farming full time with his dad at McCabe Family Farms, located 30 miles south of Rochester, MN. They have a cow-calf operation and raised pastured pork and grain-finished beef to sell direct to market. Joe always had a passion for agriculture and raising animals.
Joe shared, “I love farming, and I get to do it everyday. Sometimes I don’t even feel like I have a job! Selling direct-to-market allows us to keep doing what we’re doing (due to higher margins), and provides quality products that make our land and our communities healthier.”
After getting married in 2009, Joe and Amanda had four children; Trayton, Addison, Jaxon, and Hazel. Working together as a family to operate the day to day tasks is something that brings great joy in running their small family farm. Joe and Amanda hope to build a legacy for their children and generations to come.
Today, the McCabe’s offer beef, pastured pork, poultry and free range eggs to local customers. Before the pandemic, their marketing was a mix of word-of-mouth, some Facebook and attending farmers markets. Joe explained that it wasn’t enough, stating “we weren’t doing as many direct sales as we wanted to, and knew we could be much more effective. We’d been thinking about signing up for Barn2Door for a long time, and thought of it as our next important step.”
Joe explained, “we switched when our existing website contract was up—it was just a website. We needed more direction and help moving our business online; up until that point we were paying monthly for a website that didn’t offer anything else. So, we signed up with Barn2Door to have a custom website with an online store, and a whole company and real people who knew what we were trying to accomplish, who could advise and help us do what more we needed to be doing.”
Since their online store went live in March 2020, Joe and Amanda have been routinely sold out—offering direct home delivery and ramping up production to meet demand. Joe and Amanda sat down with Barn2Door to explain what’s worked for McCabe Family Farms and their plans to expand.
“The [Barn2Door] Support has been huge. We love everything about Barn2Door so far—having someone to walk through each step was important (Onboarding Manager), and the monthly meetings (Account Manager) made sure we could touch base, get our questions answered, and hear suggestions for what other protein producers were doing to sell more. We really liked that.”
The McCabe’s signed up with Barn2Door in February of 2020, and had a live online store by early March, just in time for the pandemic concerns to impact food supply, especially for staples like ground beef.
“The sales came in fast, as soon as our store was live, “ Amanda recounted. “Word-of-mouth spread from existing customers in surrounding areas. Social media has been really effective, and now we have new customers for weekly direct home delivery, and on-farm pickup each Sunday. We’ve sold out twice now, and are bringing in more animals and thinking about how to scale production this summer.
The first batch of 260 chickens already pre-sold on the store, so we doubled our production. We have 500 coming next week, another 500 in June, and we’re thinking about another batch as well! We have a steady supply of beef, since we finish our own cows, and we brought in two pigs a couple weeks ago—we’re out now until December!
There’s such high demand for farm-direct sales, and direct door-to-door delivery is what people like—that’s the way of the future, and we don’t see it changing. We’ve gotten so much encouragement from people who love the delivery, saying ‘I never knew it was possible to order directly from a Farmer!’ They’re excited about cutting out the middleman and going right to the producer, then getting delivered to!
We’re still going to one farmers market (when we have enough product!). It’s a good place to tell customers about us and get them excited about our products and direct delivery! Eventually, we’ll get to a point with sales where we’ll only do delivery.
With Barn2Door, the whole thing is a huge time-saver. The scheduling is easy. With four kids, it’s important to set our own schedule. The ability to designate delivery days and zones, block off certain days, and print a pick and pack list makes it easy to throw orders together and direct delivery a breeze. You [Barn2Door] have made it so easy, and you’re always willing to hear our feedback if something more could be added!”
Joe and Amanda’s advice to other producers right now? “Just keep putting yourself out there, and be consistent. So many people don’t know that they can shop directly from Farms. It’s up to us to inform everybody. You’re selling—and people are buying—a story. Tell it with social media. People are so excited to buy once they know you’re there and see it’s easy to order and get your food delivered.”
At Barn2Door, we work hard to support Farms like McCabe Family Farm, to make their lives (and their customers’ buying experience) as easy as possible. You can read the 5 Easy Steps to Make Door-to-Door Delivery Profitable for Your Farm, and learn how Barn2Door works in 5:00.