From Hobby to Full-time Farmer with Bennett Farms
In this week's episode, Barn2Door CEO, Janelle, talks with Tom Bennett from Bennett Farms about the important transition from Hobby Farmer to Full-time Farmer. Tom discusses what aspects to focus on, and what to not get too tied up in within that transition.
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Janelle Maiocco: Welcome to the DirectFarm podcast. I'm Janelle, the CEO and founder of Barn2Door.
Our mission is to help farmers improve access to their products, increasing sales, accessing more customers, and saving time and money. At Barn2Door, we're proud to be farmer-first, investing in software and services tailored to the unique needs of farmers. One of the services we are delighted to offer is our Connect program, where farmers can speak with six figure farmers built on Barn2Door.
We're delighted when farmers are willing to pay it forward and share their wisdom and experience building a successful farm business. [00:01:00] In today's episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we have the privilege of speaking with Tom Bennett of Bennett Farms, a pastured protein farm based in Edwardsburg, Michigan.
Tom began working with Barn2Door almost four years ago. He's a veteran, a father of six, and had the goal of becoming a full time farmer. Fast forward four years, Tom has become a full time farmer and built a thriving business, expanding to serve customers from Chicago to Detroit with direct delivery, pickups, and markets.
Among many publications, Tom has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Acres Magazine, on local television, and in several local newspapers. Tom serves as a farm advisor to Barn2Door, and regularly shares his advice and feedback with Barn2Door farmers. Now, let's dive in to our conversation with Tom to capture his practical advice for hobby farmers dreaming of building a full time farm business.
Welcome, Tom.
Tom Bennett: Hey, thanks for having me, Janelle.
It feels like I've been with Barn2Door longer than four years. Man, time flies.
Janelle Maiocco: It's amazing how like fast and [00:02:00] slow it goes at the same time, right?
Tom Bennett: Yeah. .
Janelle Maiocco: I remember you saying, like, the stretch from going from hobby farmer and then doing off farm job at the same time as the farm job, and you literally were like, that is a tough transition.
It is tough.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, it's a big wall for most people to overcome. Yeah, there's a little gap right there for a year in between the two, where everything sucks.
Janelle Maiocco: Like when you're doing both, still?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, when you're doing both. When you're trying to make that leap from where you're too big to keep doing what you're doing as a hobby farm, because it's just too much to like put with a normal life as well with an off farm job.
But, you're not quite big enough yet to leave your healthcare and 401k and your, your salary at your regular job. So, that's what separates out I think a lot of the people who, you know, if you, if you've got the, the gumption to, to do that or not.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, that's the rubber meet the road scenario, right? Isn't that what they used [00:03:00] to say? Well, hey, before we get started, um, I just want to back up and say thank you for serving in our military. Uh, we love working with veterans in particular. Can you tell us a little bit about your service?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, I was in the Marine Corps from 2001 to 2010. Um, I went into boot camp, actually, just prior to September 11th, while I was in boot camp, September 11th happened.
So it was, you know, me and all the guys in my platoon, we were like, you know, we were just here for fun in college, and like, crap, now we're going to war. So it's like, like, go figure, you know, just my luck. But... It was a good, it was a good experience. I really did love the Marines. But, after it got to be around eight years and I was kind of ready to come home and put down roots and build assets and let my children know who their grandparents are, cause it's hard to do that when you're moving all over the world.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah.
Tom Bennett: Bought some farmland a few years before I got out, where we ended up farming and whatnot once I separated from the military. So came home, built a house, started farming, as a hobby farm, at first, just keeping to [00:04:00] ourselves and then it grew from there.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I know it sounds, it probably sounds a little cheesy, but for me, the fact that you, you know, donated and sacrificed to protect our soil abroad and now you're like literally building our soil at home is kind of cheesy and fun, but also pretty impressive. Can you tell us a little bit about your current farm business, just so there's some context to where you are today? Including, you know, what you're growing and harvesting.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. So, we're exclusively pasture raised meats. So we do pork, chicken, turkey, and we're starting to dabble in beef. We don't have enough beef to constantly have it in supply, but we are harvesting some steers and cattle every couple of months.
But, it goes fast when we do have it. So, maybe next year we'll have more beef consistently. So meats, we do 19 farmers markets a week in the summer. During the winter, we probably drop down to seven a week . And then our online store is huge for us. So we're constantly pushing the online shopping to our [00:05:00] customers at all those markets.
And then we do some wholesale stuff. We don't really pursue that aggressively, just because we're busy enough with our direct to consumer stuff that we don't need the wholesale. But if they reach out to us, we do try and work with them. And then we even supply other farms with our meats, like maybe it's a vegetable farm and they have vegetable CSAs, but they also would like to offer their customers chicken and eggs.
So, they'll buy from us wholesale and then resell it to their customers. That's pretty much it. Yeah, just online markets.
Janelle Maiocco: Didn't you say you're targeting a tri state area, to o?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. Kind of where they all three converge at the bottom corner of Lake Michigan. We're hitting at least a hundred mile circle from the bottom corner of Lake Michigan.
Janelle Maiocco: And you're doing a lot of farmer markets. Obviously, that's a great venue to get to know customers and capture their emails. Are you also doing quite a bit of delivery? Do you also do pickups?
Tom Bennett: Oh, yeah, absolutely, so we're [00:06:00] doing the pickups. We'll do pickups at farmers markets. That's easy. Like today, we just had someone leave for a farmer's market on here on a Wednesday evening and she took four pickups with her, and the pickups were substantial. She probably took more, 'cause they were, one of 'em was a $400 pickup, another one was like $150 pickup.
So, she probably took $700 worth of pickups with her to that Wednesday night market. That's like as much as she'll do in sales. There is 700 as well. So, I mean, the pickups can be a big part of, going to a market. But then tomorrow we've got a delivery route that's going out. And it's going to take two or three vans, 14 hours.
So we've got, it's a huge stack. I've been working on it all day. We got a ton of deliveries going on tomorrow. Uh, mostly that's because that's our subscription day as well, and so when that subscription day hits, it's a crazy day. So yeah, delivery, subscriptions.
Janelle Maiocco: So, when you say pickups, you are using your farmer market, as a pickup location. You purchase online, it's already done. It's paid for. And then I, the customer, [00:07:00] I'm showing up to pick up. Is that your, is that what you're talking about? And is that the entirety of your pickup?
Tom Bennett: Well, they can do our farmers market locations as pickup points or our farm as an option too. They can pick up at our farm any day of the week. It's, it's advertised on there, which we had someone pick up here today. But yeah, we don't do any pickup locations that are just in like church parking lots or anything like that.
You could do that, but we're at so many farmers markets anyways, it's easy enough for us just to do it that way. And, I personally don't want to plan on meeting three people at a parking lot at some pickup, and then one of them doesn't show up, and now I'm going back home with this stuff.
You know, like, I just... I've never done it. I'm not saying that it's not a great idea, um, but it just works out for us that we use our farmer's markets as pickup locations.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, that's awesome. It makes a ton of sense. You're already there and selling product to passerbys in addition to the pickup. So, that's great.
And did you, just for the sake of clarity, because when we're talking about [00:08:00] moving from, you know, a hobby farm into full time farming, what did you start with in terms of fulfillment?
Tom Bennett: Our first, fulfillment options were market pickups and home delivery we did right out the gate, as far as we were doing.
Our delivery area was only slightly smaller than it is now when we started doing delivery. Although, at first, delivery is awfully slow. If you think you're just gonna open up a delivery area and overnight, you're just gonna have a flood of orders, like you're going to be disappointed, because it takes a little bit to build up that customer base, because when you're delivering to one customer, once you start delivering to her neighborhood, her neighbors find out about it and then her neighbors, start ordering, so she'll tell her friends and then it'll kind of build, and we have a big farmers market presence.
So, we kind of have a competitive advantage in building up delivery zones because our farmers markets are also in the areas like in Chicago, Michigan, Indiana. So, that really jumpstarts the home delivery. But yeah, we did home delivery, and you know, when [00:09:00] your home deliveries are slow when you first start out, just don't do as many fulfillments.
Do it every other week, or maybe you do once a month home delivery to that region, and that'll let your orders build for two or three weeks before you go.
Janelle Maiocco: It almost sounds like that's a good way to let the word, get the word out, right? Let that spread naturally from neighbors to neighbors and... You know, they're seeing, they're seeing those deliveries happen. Have a little bit of FOMO probably like, wait, where are you getting all those great chicken eggs and meat from and everything else?
So, I hear a couple of things. One: because when you're thinking hobby farm to, to full time farming, obviously you care about having a lot of customers and market reach, and it sounds to me like one of the pieces of advice you would give would be, hey, if you start in farmer markets where you want to deliver or have people purchase for pickup, so whatever target area, that farmer markets are a great place to start to get the word out.
Tom Bennett: It is. Even if you're just doing it just so you can establish [00:10:00] your name in that area, it's important, I think, because like Chicago is a great example for us. We've been offering Chicago delivery since probably 2019. The first year we were doing it, we didn't have any Chicago farmers markets that we attended.
So, it was very slow. And we're like, how can a city of six, seven million people like only get a few orders a week? Like what is wrong here? And then as soon as we started doing markets there, now we're swamped with Chicago deliveries. So, they just didn't know you existed is the problem.
It's, it's not that your stuff's not good, if they don't know that you're there, or that what you're offering is available, they can't buy it. So you've either got to aggressively advertise in that region or be in that region, spread the word of mouth, one person at a time, like we did.
Janelle Maiocco: So, in terms of customers, because I know that my folks want me to ask you a lot about customers, too, I mean, what are you doing at those farmer's markets? Obviously, you have customers then coming up to your booth or potential customers to then order from you later. How are you [00:11:00] best using that opportunity to make sure that you're able to penetrate into that specific market?
Tom Bennett: Almost every conversation with a customer ends up coming around to the online store at some point. So, they'll come up and they'll say, Oh, the farmer's market's ending in two weeks, where can we find you in the winter? Well, you can find us all year round at our online store. Here's a flyer. It's delivered straight to your house every week. It's actually Thursdays are delivery to this region that you're in.
We were looking for that pork chorizo that we had from you last week. I see, you don't have it this week, will you have it next week? And I'm like, yes, we could. I'm not sure what we'll be bringing into the market next week. We do have it in stock though. So, if you pre -order it online, anytime up until 6 PM the night before the market for pickup here, you're guaranteed to have it, or you could just have it delivered to your house. And then every single person we talked to is getting a flyer, I go through 60, 000 flyers a year for our online store. Yep.
Janelle Maiocco: So, what's a good measure? Let's say you're at a Saturday at a market, I'm starting to get really curious about what's a good measure of a market, right? [00:12:00] Like, hey, this farmer market was, this was a success today, is it based on just sales? Is it based on flyers? Is it based on how many emails you collected?
Tom Bennett: I mean, for us, I think my, my easy metric of success is just cash made that day, like at that market. I want to see if it's a metropolitan area, probably two, three thousand dollars in sales at that one market would be a good day.
That's a successful day. It's a local regional market. If we do 800, that's okay. If we do a thousand, that's good. 1200 is better. So it just depends on the market. It's hard to say, right now our measure of success is how many turkeys did you guys sell today?
You know because we're pre -selling our thanksgiving turkey. But, it's hard for me because like I said, I have 6- 7 Farmers Markets going at a time, simultaneously on Sunday. So, I can't really have my finger on the pulse of every single conversation that's happening at those markets. [00:13:00] I just know what's happening at the one that I'm at because I'm always at a market.
Emails are a good measure. We got one guy, he can collect a hundred emails at any market he goes to every single day. You would think, well, you've been to that market six times, like there's no more emails to collect. He'll still come back with a hundred new emails. And, I've recorded his spiel to the customer when he's collecting these emails, cause none of my other employees are like, this is crazy. There's no way. So, I send it to him on Messenger, and I'm like, here's what he says, and it works.
Janelle Maiocco: Okay, I have to ask, what does he say? I mean, if I'm a hobby farmer listening to you right now, I'm like, what, how do I collect emails every, every week?
Tom Bennett: I could probably send it to you, like, in Messenger or something, to Barn2Door, but, it's like, "Hey, how you doing? Have you signed up for our email list yet? If you sign up, we're going to send you a $5 off coupon. We're not going to spam you with a bunch of junk emails. You maybe get one email a month, and then you'll be in the loop on like, if we have new products coming out, or maybe we're going to have a sale or something special is going on."
And, [00:14:00] it's not that he won't just do that to the people that are buying stuff. He'll do that to anybody who looks in his direction at the booth. I see that he has a hundred email signups from the market, and he might have been at a market where he did 2, 500 in sales and he's by himself.
I'm like, how do you have time to give that spiel to every person and run the register to check out that much in sales? Like, you keep doing what you're doing. You collect those emails because they pay dividends. You send out one email and it'll generate many thousands of dollars in sales once you have a few thousand people on your email list.
Janelle Maiocco: Talk about a great return for an email. Obviously, if people are interested in local food, they're showing up at those farmer markets, so that really is the right audience, right? And then, if you're continuing to go there and also deliver there it gives those customers a lot of options.
That's awesome. We always love the great sign of a fantastic employees if you want to duplicate them, you know, and be like, can I just have like 10 of you? That would be great. So kudos to you for finding someone who's, [00:15:00] who's so good at collecting emails. That's fantastic.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, he was actually hired as a farmhand too.
He wasn't even hired on as like a market salesperson. He was hired to work on the farm. And I said, "that's fine, I can hire you. I'd keep you full time year round, but are you willing to go to a couple of markets a week if I need you to? It works better for me, if you can cover some markets too, if you're good enough to do that." And, he was the best market person we've ever had. Yeah, he did a really good job.
Janelle Maiocco: Oh, that's awesome. No, I appreciate that.
Hey, okay. So, a couple of things here. Just, if you want to expand a little bit I want to go into some specific tips that you might have for folks that are trying to move from hobby to full time farming. But before we do that, can you just speak to us a little bit about sort of the loyal customer base? And I mean, clearly we're talking about gathering their emails.
How do you penetrate a market in specific areas and how, be patient with yourself, obviously, but there's good ways to do that more efficiently, especially with the farmer market, but they keep [00:16:00] coming back and buying more. Tom, tell us, why do they keep coming back and buying more from you?
Tom Bennett: Well, I mean, obviously, a good product, you gotta have that.
Otherwise, especially in today's day and age, thanks to Barn2Door and the movement that's going on right now with people wanting to get back to grassroots growing their own food. There's a lot of direct to consumer farms out there. I feel like it's more saturated now than it was four years ago.
So, you've got to produce as good of a quality product as them. I find that a lot of the loyalty and why they buy for me as opposed to maybe somebody that's two booths down from me it's just as good as mine, I'm not disparaging anybody's product. Yeah. This stuff's awesome, too. I'll hear a lot, "I really liked your smile. I'm going to buy from you." You know what I mean? Or, "you're very personable." It comes down to relationships with customers. Just don't look at them as a sale. I want to know, "how is your life, how are your kids? Oh, did you have that baby yet? Your shoes look cool. Where'd you get those?"
Just talk to them, don't try and sell them stuff. I genuinely care about these people. [00:17:00] And it entertains me while I'm there at the market all day. Just to be like, "where'd you get that shirt? That's awesome."
And they're like, "Oh, at this place, what are you selling?" "Oh, I'm selling chicken." They're like, "Oh, I need chicken. Let me get some."
It's funny how people walking by that weren't going to probably buy anything end up spending a hundred. Well, this happened the other day. These two guys, they were kind of just, creeping by my booth, looking at it, they asked me a couple of questions. I didn't think they were going to buy anything. And then, they just started loading up piles of meat by my register. I'm like, "what are you guys doing?" I was like, "I didn't think you were going to buy anything." And they were like, "well, it was either you or the other guy, but we like you better." You know, and so they'll probably continue to come back.
That's kind of customer loyalty, also like with our eggs we'll do a thing where people ask, "how much are your eggs?" I'll say, "they're seven dollars a dozen, but if you return the Bennett Farms egg carton to us, you get a 50 cent credit for every egg carton return that's Bennett Farms cartons. We won't give you credits for other, you can return any carton, we'll only get credits for the 50 cents for the [00:18:00] Bennett Farms ones." And, they're like, "Oh, that's awesome." So now, they're coming back every week to return their carton and they're buying more eggs. And if they're buying eggs, they're probably buying chicken breast too.
So, there's things that you can do like that. Take care of people on the customer service side. If they're not happy with something, forget about you losing like $30 or $70 on refunding something. Just make 'em happy. Make it a good experience. Then, if that customer continues to be an issue like two, three times, like I've had customers in the past that I just kind of will easily let them go, because you can't let 20% of your customers take up 80% of your time.
Not every customer is maybe meant for you, but make everybody happy. Don't give them anything bad to say about you, even if it means losing money. And a lot of times, those customers, they were just having a bad day or maybe there was legitimately something wrong with your product.
So, we have a five star reviews on Google. We've never had [00:19:00] anything but a five star review, and I would pay thousands of dollars to keep it that way. If someone's upset about something, I should make it right, make them happy. Everything I can to make them happy, even if they're like, well Bennett Farms, they screwed this up, but man, their customer service was awesome.
Anytime we have a mistake, like that's a perfect time for us to show how great we are at taking care of our customers.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that, not only just the keep, I guess it's sort of like just keep that relationship, keep it human, obviously, we care about that too as a business.
If somebody is not happy with your product or something just misfired somewhere along the way, you still want them to have a good experience of you. Even if they're not going to buy from you again, right? It's like, "Hey, we still want you to understand we're human. We care. People make mistakes," that sort of a thing.
One thing I love that you said, and I think this is maybe important if people are in hobby farming, trying to turn it into a full time business, is almost permission to let go of customers. Like you said, [00:20:00] if, if 20 percent of your customers and even less, like if 5 percent of your customers are taking a lot of time in our kind of high demand or continue to be unhappy or something like that, it's okay to say "hey, actually we're gonna go after different customers," and it's okay not to serve every single customer.
Can you speak more to that because that's some good advice, you don't want to be afraid to lose customers so much so that you're bending over backwards even, I don't want to say changing your business model, but.
Tom Bennett: So, yes, it took me a while to get to the point and I think maybe it's because, in my first year, I wish I would have had this advice, but I didn't and I did bend over backwards and I'm like making exceptions for things for certain people and I can't do that now, once we got so big, like big enough, like I can't do these like little one off changes for everyone.
Like our subscription box is an example. We have a 10 and 20 pound meat box. In the early days, people would be like, "we don't want any pork [00:21:00] chops or we don't want this or that." And that's not the way the box is supposed to be. The box is farmer's choice. And that's why you get the discount, is because it's farmer's choice.
If you want to custom tailor a box, like exactly how it's gonna be, that's called ala cart. You don't want to pay full price, just do it every month. But anyway, we had a customer recently that was like, "Oh, I didn't like these and don't send me any more of these and don't send me any more, or I want more of these or can you send me," I'm like, "Look, you know, I can't, I can't do that. This is a farmer's choice box. So, we have too many customers, too many boxes. If I promised you that I could do those things, I guarantee you, I would screw it up. At some point, I would forget. You would be unhappy." I said, "you know, maybe this just isn't, it's not for everyone, that's okay."
She was like, "you know what, you're right. I was kind of thinking that maybe this isn't for me." And I was happy to see her go, because this wasn't the first time that I've had issues with this lady, you know, and so, yeah, she was buying a 140 a month subscription box, and [00:22:00] that's a few thousand dollars a year, but you know what, the day she canceled, two more people ordered that 20 pound box, two more people that aren't complaining, so that made my life exponentially easier, because I got too much to do to be bending over backwards like that.
So yeah, you just have to learn to say no, sometimes, I was always a yes man, in the beginning where I was just, "yes, we can do that. We can do that. We can do that." Maybe when you're a hobby farm, you can, you can fulfill all those promises, but once you get to over a half million creeping towards a million a year in sales, you're not going to be able to be everybody's yes man.
You've just got to follow your policies and do what you say you'll do and don't do what you haven't already decided that you would do.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. That's a very strong tip. Tip number one. You don't have to be all things to all people. You don't have to say yes to every request, especially when you're trying to scale and grow larger, because you have to consider your time from an efficiency perspective.
And if there's enough [00:23:00] customers loving that and wanting that, that's okay, right? And it's okay to let them go.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, and we have, the way we do things, we have it in place so it's the same for everyone, like all of our customers. And if I'm constantly making these, these little adjustments for everyone and allowing this for them, I'm gonna screw up.
I'm gonna disappoint someone because I, no matter how hard I try, I'm gonna forget something at some point, and then, makes us look bad. There's a lot of farms out there and she said, "well, I'm gonna go try this other farm." And I'm like, "yeah, he's a good guy. Enjoy it." But I knew he was getting out of pigs, like before she even called him, he wasn't gonna be able to help her anyways.
Janelle Maiocco: So, I can ask, do you have any other tips top of mind? I think, yeah. Yeah. We've covered some pretty critical ones, but I wanna make sure I give you a chance to sort of free rein some tips here for, for some folks.
Tom Bennett: As far as when you're getting into farming, it's hard to do more than three things well. Okay, you just, so I would say limit yourself to [00:24:00] three key livestock species that you're gonna build your farm around. It doesn't have to be three, it could be two. We were two for a very long time, just pork and chicken.
And I see a big problem a lot of times with, with people who admire what I do, and meet me at a farmer's market, and say they want to do what I do and I've inspired them, but they're raising ducks, lamb, goat, they got three Kunekune pigs, they got, they want, they're probably got a peacock running around their farm and a donkey.
Like you, it's not a hobby farm. You know what I mean? If you only need to raise animals that make you money that you can turn over and make a good profit on, like that is a petting zoo. That's not a farm.
And you're losing money on all of those, it's not going to be one. Even when you do just three animals, you're going to have one species of livestock that's actually making most of your money when you look at it.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I think that to [00:25:00] your point, you're right. That's what it comes down to. While all those animals might be fantastic, and maybe you do have some that are even your pets, but at the end of the day, if you want to turn this into a profitable business, you need to focus hard on two or three species, and what, get it right, and think about profit.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, so I would say, you know, focus on three because you start doing more than three, you won't do any of them well. And I think that segues into maybe don't focus on niche meats early on, like you need to focus on meats that make money and that are, that everyone eats. So, we'll go back to sheep again. Sheep are great. You know, I probably get asked for lamb once a day at a farmer's market.
But we also serve, gosh, six, seven, 700 people, at least customers check out through our POS on a Saturday and on a Sunday, like so 1, 400 a weekend, just on Saturday and Sunday, two of them probably ask for sheep, you know what I mean? While people do [00:26:00] ask for it. It's not a lot of people.
I was speaking at a school sometime last year. I was invited in to speak to an ag class and one of the questions from the, from the kids in the group was, " why don't you raise sheep? You only do pork and chicken." And so, okay, "show of hands, how many of you ate chicken in the last month?"
And every single person, I said, "all right, now show of hands. How many of you have ate sheep in the last month?" Nobody raised their hand. Even the girl that asked the question, didn't raise her hand. I said, "that is why I don't raise sheep." Because yeah, it's great. Like certain people want it, but it might be for a holiday event or I do know people that raise sheep as farmers and I think they sell a decent amount of sheep.
But, it's hard to sell a million dollars worth of sheep a year like through online stores or farmers market. You just can't get the volume that you need, really. It might be a nice add- on side item. That could be one of your three livestock. But it's never gonna be your huge moneymaker, [00:27:00] like if you're raising chicken or beef or pork, those are gonna blow that out of the water because everybody eats chicken.
Janelle Maiocco: I think sometimes it's like it might seem obvious, but it's also good to say it out loud, right? If you're trying to turn hobby into full time business, grow what people eat a lot of is awesome.
Tom Bennett: You have to focus on that. You have to focus on making money as much as you focus on raising a good quality product and having good relationships with customers.
Maybe you have to focus on making money more than those other things, because if you don't make money, you can't do those other things. It all comes down to cash flow and revenue, because you can only be upside down in this for so long before you end up divorced and losing your house and bankrupt. You've got to make money at some point, and you're not gonna replace your off farm job with sheep, alone.
You've gotta have one of the three primaries, at least in there. Even beefalo people are like, or bison people all the time. Like, oh, why don't you sell bison? Or I had a guy the other day, why [00:28:00] don't you sell like wild game? I'm like, well, first of all, it's gotta be USDA. And USDA slaughter requires a live animal to walk in, so all of your venison, elk, all that stuff you're eating at fancy restaurants, that's all farmed.
That's farmed venison, farmed elk, because it can't be USDA inspected and shopped. It's hard enough to make money and do this with something that everyone eats, try and do it with some exotic animal. It's going to go poorly. I mean, maybe you could try that stuff out once you've established yourself with primary meats, and you want to paddle with it on the side, but you shouldn't.
Janelle Maiocco: So, so no peacocks, bison, or sheep is what I'm hearing.
Tom Bennett: No, yes. If you got a peacock, bison, or sheep, I mean, and I don't want to say sheep. I know a lot of good sheep farmers that are going to listen to this podcast because...
A lot of the farms that are at markets with me, they do follow Barn2Door stuff, and they're gonna think, I'm not disparaging like them selling sheep, like it is a great item to sell, I just think there's [00:29:00] a severe limit on your growth with that, you have a very shallow ceiling, I guess.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I think to your point, people just might not eat it as much, right? And, so, if you need to count on money makers that are already proven out in the market, like chicken on your table every week, beef on your table every week and hopefully more sheep, right? Hopefully there is more sheep increasingly on people's table.
And same with rabbit probably, right? That people are maybe expanding their protein, more proteins on the table. But today, the markets definitely all in on chicken and beef, that is for sure. And pork probably is in there, too, yeah?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, yeah, it is. Like I said, we primarily focused on pork and chicken and then, you realize that like 60 percent of the world's population can't eat pork for religious reasons, but still, a lot of people can.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, but eyes wide open, right, on, in terms of what you're choosing as you're, if you're starting with three. Choose some that are highly popular and not niche, I think, is a great piece of advice. [00:30:00] And then, I think the other one, Tom, and correct me if I'm wrong, in terms of choosing not just what people are eating, but you're also choosing items that turn a profit.
Tom Bennett: Yeah.
Janelle Maiocco: Fast. Faster than maybe other.
Tom Bennett: Right, exactly.
Janelle Maiocco: Because it took you a while before you did beef, am I correct?
Tom Bennett: Correct. Yeah, it did. We just started doing it last year. We bought our first stocker calves ever, maybe a little more than that ago. But, it did take me a while, because I was too busy turning over product with pork and chicken.
I mean, it took every daylight hour that we had on our farm to produce as much as that as we could just to keep up with demand for that, that I had no time to even look at purchasing beef herds to put on our farm. Cause every hour of my day was already spoken for. It's focused on what makes money and what you can turn over quick.
Chicken is super easy, it's super easy to make money on because everybody eats it.
Janelle Maiocco: And they grow fast, right?
Tom Bennett: Yeah, and they grow fast, right. But if you're gonna do chicken, don't do heritage dual purpose [00:31:00] for meat consumption, and think you're gonna do Rhode Island Reds as a broiler.
That almost becomes a niche thing again. It's not the same chicken as what you can easily sell like with the Cornish Cross. Or if you're gonna do pigs, do not do Kunekunes and think that they're so cute and you're gonna do Kuniekunies, like those things take two years to grow and you get 90 pounds from them.
That's a niche item, that's not really doing pork, that's doing a very niche breed of pork that has a very small market base and your prices, if you're not going to go bankrupt, raising Kunekune, your prices are going to be like $18 a pound for pork chops, and you've got the same customer base for that as you did for sheep.
You know what I mean? You just narrowed the customer base way down.
Janelle Maiocco: What breeds would you recommend if I'm going all in on poultry and pork?
Tom Bennett: Poultry, you should start out with Cornish Cross or the Red Freedom Rangers. Cornish Cross would be my first choice.
The Red Freedom [00:32:00] Ranger, if you just have something against the Cornish Cross, you can get away with doing those, but they're gonna have, they're not a double breasted bird, so you have smaller breasts. It'll look, look a little scrawnier than a Cornish cross would, so, say Cornish cross on chicken.
With pork, yeah, I'd probably go with like, Duroc, Hamps, Red Wattle is fine. Just stay away from the small breed pigs. No American Guinea Hogs, no Kunekunies. Even when you get into Mulefoot, and some of those really old style heritage breeds, it gets questionable, like on how profitable you can make that just because their grow out time is so long and there's so much fat on them.
So, you could have a 300 pound lightweight hog of say a mule foot, and it might only yield 120 pounds of sellable meat because everything else was fat, and they have a six inch back fat cap. So, just stick with more of your standard breeds. I mean, you can use the breeds that conventional producers [00:33:00] use, but the methods that you're using a lot of the times, like with us, our angle is it's all pasture raised, non GMO, antibiotic free. So, our methods is what's selling it, not that we're raising a different animal than what conventional farms are raising. We're just raising it in a different way.
Janelle Maiocco: That makes a ton of sense. I appreciate that. And then if I am trying to, I mean, we talked at the beginning a little bit about moving from the combination of on your farm but also your off farm job, and having that year transition where you're doing both at once, which is seemingly impossible and pain a bit painful.
Is there, A: an elegant way to do that, and B: how did you finally pull the trigger? What's the decision maker on, I can do this full time now? I suspect there's some advice in that.
Tom Bennett: Well, one, I had to prove that I could successfully raise animals without them all dying, that I could sell and raise animals, like, if you haven't sold a thousand chickens a year yet, don't quit your day job, don't think [00:34:00] that because you raised a batch of chickens and none of them died and it was a hundred and you sold them all to your friends and family that you should just quit your job, because it takes a long time to go from selling a hundred chickens a year to two thousand.
Now, once you get to two thousand chickens a year It's easy to go from two thousand to eight thousand or two thousand to six thousand, like those growth numbers happen fast, but it's that first getting into the market, and initially, you're going to have all these curious sympathy buyers that are your aunt and your mom and your...
If they're related to you, they don't count. Like, as far as your gauge of if it's possible to do this or not. Because, they're going to help. They're probably just helping you out on your journey, so you should probably be able to sell while you still have your regular farm job, one to 2000 chickens a year, to prove that you can actually do this before I quit my regular job.
And, it's gonna take a while. Like, there's gonna be at least a year of it really sucking [00:35:00] where, maybe your family's like, we never see you. You pretty much got to do them both as long as you can. And then when you do quit your regular job, like it's scary the first six months.
Like when you leave, especially like me, I walked away from a six figure plus job, left it with healthcare, 401k, all that stuff. I didn't realize healthcare was 1600 bucks a month. When you have to buy it on the open market for crappy healthcare, like you're not just replacing your income, you're also buying like health insurance and benefits.
But that also is a big driver, too, because when you wake up in the morning and it's your first week, first day, that you no longer have off farm income employment, that's a really strong motivator for you to get up and collect those emails and send out an email list or to get up and fear is a very strong factor for driving your success once you do this as a full time thing.
Because... Your lights being on in your house will depend upon it. You've got to be successful and I liked that challenge. Like it [00:36:00] was scary at first, but eventually you'll realize with online and you almost can't do that unless you're online. I still, even with as many farmers markets as we do and all the revenue we have, if I didn't have an online store, I would still have to work an on farm job, even if it was working for the city plowing snow in the winter or something. I would have to because our revenue would just completely dry up going into the winter if it wasn't for our online sales.
Being a protein vendor, I don't think you could do it without having an online store. Because all of your capital, even during the summer, is going right back into production and payroll and everything.
So, it's not like you're sitting on like a million dollars going into winter, everything's cash flowing and you're making profit, but you still need to make sales through the winter, and so, without an online store today, if, if my online store closed, I would have to get a job again.
Janelle Maiocco: Ouch.
Tom Bennett: Yeah.
Janelle Maiocco: Well, let's not close down your online store.
Tom Bennett: You know what I mean. It's that important to get online customers and build year to [00:37:00] year revenue through the winter, because it's a huge part of our income.
Janelle Maiocco: And Tom, is that partly because you're collecting those emails all summer?
And so when the other, when some of the markets might be closed, they're still buying and picking up or you're still delivering. So those are like, those relationships are extending year round, clearly. Even if markets are closed, even if that might be where you met some of those folks. And then, of course, as you were saying, you're starting to deliver and the neighbors are noticing so that, you're probably getting customers, too, that have never even gone to the farmer's market in most cases.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, I have a lot of customers that have never been to a farmer's market, a lot of elderly people that like the convenience of having it delivered to their house and just raising good quality meats and it reminds them of what their dad used to do back when they were a kid. They love the nostalgia of what we're doing as well.
Janelle Maiocco: I just think you can't replace sometimes, you have to appreciate the fact that food, food is a connector, historically and naturally. And for folks to have it delivered and know you as their farmer and then have that on their [00:38:00] table, and they know where it came from and they know that it was lovingly grown, it's just such a different experience than if they bought the same product at a grocery store, it just seems to me so much more relational, meaningful. And as you well know, the quality is just so much better.
Tom Bennett: Yeah. And it's even funnier, when you're still a small farm and you're the one delivering it. I can still remember, we were delivering on a Thanksgiving a couple years ago and I went up to somebody's house and this guy was like, "Thank you, thank you."
He was like, "oh my gosh, are you that, are you Tom Bennett?" And I was like, "yeah." He's like, "hun, come here." She was prepping the turkey for Thanksgiving, he made her come outside and see me. She's like, "this is the guy," you know, like I'm some celebrity. They think it's so cool that like I'm delivering the product.
My daughter delivered to a wholesale account last week, and they just couldn't believe that Tom's daughter was delivering their stuff.
Janelle Maiocco: That is so awesome.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, it is. I mean, I don't know what people expect. I think with ButcherBox and all those other big service companies that kind of try and replicate the boutique meat experience, they can never have the [00:39:00] authenticity that we can provide, like being the real farmers actually delivering it to your doorstep.
Janelle Maiocco: One of the reasons we're so passionate here and you know this already, but it motivates the people who are working at Barn2Door is, because we know that what we're doing can help farmers who want to sell direct, and that's that relationship, right? And so for us, it's really motivating to know that you know your buyers, and your buyers know you, because nothing can replicate that, right? And for us just to be some software in the background facilitating a direct sale model versus to your point when there's aggregation and everything else, I just, for us that puts the hands, puts the power back into the hands of the farmer and those relationships and the buyers, frankly. Um, which, we find obviously terribly exciting.
I do need to ask what's like the biggest thing to avoid?
Tom Bennett: Don't get in a race to the bottom. So, don't try and be the cheapest person in your sector doing what you do.
The cheapest person doing what you do is going to be the first one to go out of business. This isn't [00:40:00] Tyson vs. Purdue. And if you play that game, you don't have the volume or the bankroll to try and play chicken with your competitors in the industry that you're coming into to try and win market share.
I mean, that's hard. Like maybe you're on sales, but don't try and permanently price your prices below everyone else just to try and gain market share, because it will not save you. It will just run you out of business quicker, and actually, the more you scale, the faster you'll see, because when you're real small you can lose money and it doesn't hurt that bad. But, when you start selling 10- 12, 000 chickens a year and 400 hogs, like we do, if your numbers are even slightly wrong, you're gonna know it within a month. So, you've got to make sure that your margins are good that you're making money.
And so, just don't get in a race to the bottom with people, let them find another way to provide that value to the customer. Even if it's not dollars per pound, it could be, you make 'em laugh every time they talk to you. You [00:41:00] know, like they like you. A lot of people see me as their grandson or something.
Or, customers will come up and want to take a selfie with me. Part of that's 'cause of our social media stuff. It's a good time to be a farmer. There was a period where chefs went through it, where chefs were the celebrities, in the local region.
And right now, we're still in that period where I think, your small farms are where they kind of get a little bit of that, "wow, that's cool" status.
Janelle Maiocco: One of the things that you said, Tom, that I loved before, because you do such a good job honing in on profit, profit, make sure it pencils out. Do the math. Do the math. We talked about saying yes to customers, but sometimes, and you even said this about wholesale, and I mean that in the nicest way, but make sure that the math works, to your point.
If you price too low and you're losing money, you won't have a farm. Right? And so you have to know your numbers is what I'm hearing.
Tom Bennett: Yeah, you do. You got to know your numbers. And we actually raised all of our prices. Even though we have a loyal base of buyers, we're still, to this day, not able to produce.
We're keeping stuff in stock. We're not [00:42:00] out of stock, but we're running out of stuff right before the next batch comes in. Every week, we're out of something, multiple things, but it's coming in next week. We're turning product over fast, I guess I should say.
And we can't get ahead on that. So back in the spring, I was like, forget this. I'm out of bacon two weeks a month. Like I can't predict, and so I was like, "you know what? I'm going to try and get rid of some customers. I'm going to raise all my prices a dollar a pound."
So I went up a dollar a pound on everything across the board. It was non discriminatory price increase. I just did it. I didn't even announce it, didn't do anything. I mean, you could use that as a marketing tool where, "hey, prices are going up next week. Shop now to get in on the best deal." That's a great thing to do.
I've done that in years past when we had like 25 cent price increases because that's what they've always been before. We've never went up a dollar. But this year, this spring, I'm like, "you know what? I work too hard."
We always need to make more money, anyway. So, we raised everything by a dollar. It didn't miss a beat. We sold just as much meat of all the same stuff after [00:43:00] that as we did before that. And I'm like, good thing I did. I don't know if we lost a customer, because it sure doesn't seem like it from our inventory.
It didn't slow anything down. And so I'm like, where's the ceiling on this?
Janelle Maiocco: First of all, that's a good problem to have. Right? And if I'm a hobby farmer, I'm like, how do I get to that fast?
Tom Bennett: It makes a big difference when you've passed being just a hobby farmer and you're selling many, many thousands and thousands of pounds of meat.
We sold 120,000 pounds of pork this year. 45,000 pounds of chicken and plus Turkey and everything else. We sold at least 200,000 pounds of meat this year, across all of our species with the turkey and the pork once you add that on. So, a dollar a pound across everything that we sell, that's 200, 000 dollars. Once you get to scale, pennies make a huge difference.
Janelle Maiocco: I would say that's encouraging overall, right? And I think pricing is interesting. Certainly always top of mind for folks when they're getting started. And then obviously, as they progress, it sounds like once you're more [00:44:00] established at scale, have a loyal base of customers.
Tom Bennett: And you can go the wrong way too. If you start out, and you go out there and you price your stuff way high to start with. Good on you for that, but you also got to balance it out to where you can get volume. So, don't get crazy with it.
I see it, and it's like "good on you," but you went too far that way. You got to bring it back a little bit, because you would you rather sell 10 packs of chicken breast, at $13 a pound or two packs at $18 a pound? You'd rather sell the 10 at 13, because you're going to make more money that day than you would have with 2 at 18, even though your margin is slightly less.
So, you gotta look at it from that way too, but you also can't be like, "I want to sell 69 cent chicken breasts," because then you're not making any money.
Janelle Maiocco: Even though we didn't highlight it necessarily as a bit of advice or tip, I do think, you're very aware of math, math, math.
Like, do the math. And that always applies no matter what stage that you're at.
Tom Bennett: I'm the one that's [00:45:00] staring at the numbers all day, they severely affect my mental health sometimes. I've gotta know. I pay all the bills still. I don't have a chief financial officer like Tom Bennett sits at his desk and writes out check after check.
And so, I'm very conscientious about money coming in.
Janelle Maiocco: When you run and own your own business, for all practical purposes, you are running the different quote unquote departments.
You know, the finance department, the operations, the sales, the marketing. We've talked a bit before about the marketing one being really important, even to do it yourself so that you're not losing that knowledge with maybe where it's outsourced. Is there any, advice you would give to a hobby farmer, when they're getting started and transitioning to full time farming, like top advice from a marketing lens?
Tom Bennett: Be authentic. I can tell, people can tell. They all have an ingrained sense in them. They can tell when someone's being fake and when someone's being real with them. Be authentic. People love honesty so, [00:46:00] with marketing, and if you're on social media, anything like that, one of the things that really freed me in the early years was, in the first couple years of our social media, I was always worried about, is this gonna offend someone? Or maybe a vegan will see it and they'll think that that's bad. I was worried about trying to please everyone.
And that was, good in some aspects, but it was wrong in the others because I would see other farmers that I knew at conventions I'm like, "man, I love your Instagram account, it's so awesome, your stuff's so great and funny." But it was because they didn't care what other people thought.
You can take that too far, you're a brand and you have to represent your brand well to a certain extent, but, you can also just stop worrying about pleasing every single person and just be yourself. That really helps. Our brand on social media is, I just do stuff that I think is funny for me.
I just do it to entertain myself. If other people don't like it, unfollow me. I'm just doing it cause I, I'll sit down to maybe watch TV or something at 10 o'clock at night, if I get a chance and I'll never make it because I started building a reel and cap cut. And I'll [00:47:00] do that instead of watching Netflix or something.
So, don't cheap out on getting private labels first of all, because every package of meat that you sell is an advertisement for your business, okay?
And if you're still using your butcher's label that say, Joe's Butcher Shop, processed for Bennett Farms, you're just advertising for your butcher shop on every package. Get with the label company, get private labels made that work in your butcher shops printer and have them put your label with your website and go to our online store, all that stuff on your label.
And then every package of meat you sell has an advertisement for you on it. Your brand, you know, social media is good for that. And never say no to interviews or any opportunities to speak to people. Next week we have a school coming out here, it scares me to death to say yes to a school to bring out an entire school.
One, I'm afraid they're going to be bored. Because we don't have hay wagon rides. This ain't a pumpkin patch, it's a [00:48:00] working farm. I don't say no. I'm like, yes. The only thing we gotta worry about is bathroom facilities.
I can't have... 400 kids going in my backyard. I don't have the facilities for that. They plan to keep it short. Never say no to the press, to farm visits, there's a guy coming out same time next week from Instagram. He's another social media guy. He's going to do drone stuff and do a thing on my farm. All this, I don't know, I'm like, come on.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, say yes to exposure of all kinds, right? Just say yes. Yeah, that's great advice.
Tom Bennett: Private labeling, say yes to everything. And don't get discouraged.
It's easy, to give up on this when you're early in it. Because you're not that invested in it yet, so it's easy to go back the other way. I'm so far in this now. I can't stop farming. It's easy for me to keep going because I have no other choice. You literally get into it so far that, this is your life.
But in the, in that early transition phase, it's easy to give up on it and say, you know what, this is too hard. Well, I promise you it gets easier. The [00:49:00] first couple of years are hard, they're scary. It's not going to be an overnight success. If you think that I'm going to turn on my online store and everything's just going to flood in, it's not going to happen that way.
You have to get out there and tell people that your farm exists and that your product exists. You can even write up articles about yourself and submit them to local papers.
And if you write it for them and they just proofread it, they'll put it in their paper a lot of the times because they've got a lot of paper to fill every day and their goal is just to sell advertisers.
Janelle Maiocco: And make sure they include your website URL because the goal is all roads lead back to your online store, to your brand, to your farm.
Tom Bennett: You are the only thing that decides if this is a success or not. A lot of people don't want that on their shoulders. A lot of people don't want to know, the truth of it is, is that you decide if you succeed or fail. They wanna put it on, "well, I failed because of this or that, or it was outta my control." No, you will succeed if you want to succeed bad enough.
And you will fail if you [00:50:00] don't wanna succeed bad enough. You can't blame it on, "well, I'm too rural. We couldn't make it because I'm not near a metropolitan area." Tell that to Will Harris. He's in the poorest county in the country, tell that to Will that "I was too rural to make my farm work."
You just gotta think outside the box. If you haven't built a farm yet, if you're just armchair farming right now, listening to these podcasts and you want to build a farm in a few years, if I had it to do over again, I'm driving in Chicago five days a week.
I would have definitely built my farm a little bit closer to Chicago, so think about that strategically, if you have a blank slate and you can decide, you're getting out of the military and you could live anywhere, you need to pick your location, if you want to farm full time, based on the metropolitan areas you can serve with that and combined with farmable land that's outside in the country.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you can choose to live more approximate to a city, but even outside of that, so much good advice about how to penetrate different markets nearby.
I want to say thank you so much, Tom, for [00:51:00] joining us on this week's episode of the Direct Farm Podcast and for your ongoing contributions to help others build a successful farm business, especially hopefully, like you said, armchair, hobby farmers, anybody who wants to grow and expand their business slowly but surely with lots of bits of wisdom, and obviously to benefit their local communities.
At Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, like Bennett Farms, and we're honored to have the opportunity to learn from successful farmers like Tom, including sharing all of your tactics, resources, ideas, and tools to grow and manage your business. For more information about Barn2Door, check out our website at www. barn2door. com. There you can explore litany of free resources to help your farm increase sales, access more customers, save time and money. It is a true, true joy to help farmers like Tom, and just love the authenticity and food and everything that you're doing for your community, and for your family as well.
Thank you so much Tom, and everybody for listening. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk next time.[00:52:00]