220 Years Strong: How this Generational Farm Started Selling Direct with Hopkins Farms
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we learn about a rich family history, discuss subscription boxes, and the process of home delivery with David and Candace Hopkins of Hopkins Farms. Hopkins Farms is a generational farm located in Cairo, Georgia that provides a fresh, local Farm to Table food service delivered directly to your doorstep.
hopkinsfarmsinc.com
barn2door.com/resources
-
[00:00:00]
Rory Loughran: Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory, your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with one of our newest farm advisors, David and Candace Hopkins of Hopkins farms located in Cairo, Georgia. Welcome David and Candace, it's great to have you guys here. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.
David Hopkins: Hey, thanks Rory. We are glad to be here today.
Rory Loughran: Maybe to start out, could you tell us a little bit about Hopkins Farms and what you guys produce today. I know some of the guests we have on the show are just starting their farm. That is certainly not the case for you guys. Could you tell us a little bit about the farm?
David Hopkins: Well yeah, [00:01:00] sure. Um, I'm David Hopkins, like you said, and this is my wife Candace. We're in Southwest Georgia, about as far South Georgia as you can go. Literally uh, the Florida line is about 10 miles south of where I'm sitting right now. We're about 30 minutes north of Tallahassee and a small little farming community called Reno.
Hopkins Farms has been here for forever, but right now what we're producing today, we have Bell pepper in the ground. Just really a bunch of different kinds of pepper. In general, we have Bell, Cubanelle, Scotch Bonnet, Habanero, Hunky, just any kind of pepper you can think of.
We got pepper, we got tomatoes, eggplant, squash, greens. We always got some greens around. Kale, collards, a little bit of cabbage. I've been planting peanuts all day. We got 200 acres of corn that we'd been working on fertilizing today. Just anything you can plant that's produce-wise, we definitely try it and have been trying it for a long time.
Rory Loughran: That's a lot of products you just listed [00:02:00] off there. Who else is working on the farm and helping you out with that?
David Hopkins: Main people is, is family. My father, Carroll Hopkins, my brother, Ben and myself, and then Ben and myself have two wives, Carrie and Candace and they help us with the books and we can do all the work outside and all the dirty stuff. We have probably about 30 people on our payroll.
They're here all the time and we just got to keep them around, and then when it's time to start picking tomatoes and pepper like that, we actually have traveling workers. They started in South Florida and then come to Georgia and then go to North Carolina. Just depends on what time of year it is and whose turn it is to start picking stuff.
Rory Loughran: Wow, that's, that's awesome. So you guys have a really big operation there, and you've been doing it for a long time. You guys have really deep roots in Georgia and a really long family history on that land. Could you share some of that history and about how long you guys have been there?
David Hopkins: Yeah. The way it's been explained to me, our family has the original deed to the farm that we received when Oglethorpe was establishing Georgia and handing out land [00:03:00] grants. We have it in a safety deposit box, still . Here, 220 years going, and it's still farmed under the same family. It's grown a little bit since then, but we're still here and still gonna keep going. I think I'm going to be the fourth, if not fifth generation on this same piece of land, just because, you know, everybody on that fifth generation, everybody was a farmer.
You had to be a farmer just to live. You produced everything.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. That's awesome. How has it changed? I mean, Obviously that's, 220 years is an insane amount of time, but what are some of the big changes over that course of time, especially maybe in terms of the products the farm has been producing?
David Hopkins: When my granddaddy was coming along, or when his parents were doing it, they had sugar cane and chickens, and they didn't really get in the produce yet, but the sugar cane was for cane syrup. We used to grow a bunch of sugar cane and my granddaddy would took all the cane down and makes the syrup or whatever and he'd sell the juice. And he did that, and then, [00:04:00] we're so close to Tallahassee, Florida, and that was a big populated area compared to Cairo, small town that's close to us in Georgia.
They would take chickens down there, take live chickens and had a bunch of chicken eggs they'd sell. My granddad kept doing that and then he had the opportunity to buy a piece of land in Cairo, back in town, and him and my grandmother moved up there and he started growing produce. So beans, squash, greens, any of that kind of stuff. But kinda got in the tobacco business a little bit and 60s-70s came along, we started growing more okra and more beans.
My dad did a lot of peddling. My granddad did a lot of peddling. They sold a bunch of collards and greens on the Atlanta Farmer's Market, and we kept getting deeper in the produce business. Whatever we couldn't grow produce on, we tried to do a little bit of row crop into cotton, corn, peanuts, and stuff like that.
We just kept diversifying so much that we just throw everything out and then hope it all sticks in the end. And you know, you lose money over here, but [00:05:00] hopefully you get something over there that's gonna make you enough to keep going the next year, it's worked out for 200 years so far.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's awesome. That's a really funny way of looking at it. And has it always been, I know you mentioned farmer's markets there. Has the farm always had selling direct to consumer as a focus and has that always been something you guys do?
David Hopkins: Direct to consumer hadn't always been the focus, that kind of started when I came back and started doing the farm to table, but we would always sell to farmer's markets. There's the Atlanta Farmer's Market, and then Thomasville, Georgia on the road a little bit. We have a produce broker over there and they handle all our pepper and eggplants stuff like that.
My dad handles Seminole tomatoes, but anybody that would come by and want to buy something, more than happy to sell it to them. We don't care who it is.
Rory Loughran: Yeah.
David Hopkins: You got money, we'll sell it to you. Don't worry.
Rory Loughran: Yeah definitely, not turning down any customers.
David Hopkins: All it's going to do is go bad in the cooler. So let's get it out of here.
Rory Loughran: And I know you did, you went to school over Auburn, correct?
David Hopkins: That's right, I went to Auburn University.
Rory Loughran: And what did you [00:06:00] study there?
David Hopkins: I was a horticulture major with an emphasis in fruit and vegetable production.
Rory Loughran: So was there always an expectation to take over the farm where you expected to be that next generation, and was that something you were excited about?
David Hopkins: From my dad's perspective, it was always "please find something else to do." But the summertime came around and it was, "hey, what are you doing? Get up. Let's go to work." I grew up out here. We lived in town, but we always came down here every weekend. When I was a little kid and, elementary school, middle school, I got old enough to start working and I picked tobacco all summer long when I was a little kid, picked squash, did any kind of field work. I did it. And then I finally got old enough to know how to drive and be responsible enough to drive and started taking care of all the planting, and then we got us a sprayer and I started spraying everything. So I've always just done all the road crop and stuff.
And then my brother took care of the watering of the vegetables. It never rains under plastic, all our tomatoes and eggplants and everything else has grown under plastic. So we can [00:07:00] at least control a little bit of aspects of the weather. I mean, We can't control if it's gonna rain, what the bugs are doing or anything else, but if we grown under plastic, we can atleast water it.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. Candace, I'm curious about you. Is this something that you just fell into? Was there any expectation that you would just join the crew here?
Candace Hopkins: We got married in 2014. I was working, I went to school for X-ray tech, so that's what I was doing. And and then once we had kids I stayed home and then I, I guess I got more involved once I started to stay home. I do the you know, computer stuff, everything. But yeah, it just kind of fell in my lap, but I love it. So this worked out so far.
Rory Loughran: That's awesome. So you mentioned the X-ray tech there, that's what you were doing before the farm. And David, did you go straight to the farm right out of college?
David Hopkins: Yeah, I didn't, there was no stops. I graduated, "what are you doing Monday? Going to work."
Rory Loughran: Yeah, straight into it. That's awesome. I know we have another FAN who actually went to not the same program at Auburn, but a similar one, but how did that [00:08:00] program kind of help better prepare you for running your farm and what did, what were some of the things that you apply from that program?
David Hopkins: My time at Auburn was all about problem solving and if I ever had a problem with a class, I could figure it out and just might've helped me stuff like that. I did get a little bit of knowledge from it, but you learn everything you're going to learn, putting your hands in the dirt, and then, you know, I tried a little bit on my own. I do a little test plot over here and wouldn't work. You know, it's always good to be able to change it just a little bit, or try to experiment on your own, but what you're going to learn at school versus what you learned actually in the field is completely different.
Rory Loughran: It's interesting that you say that too, because I feel like more and more now you run into farmers that are just starting, that they didn't go to school for it, they're kind of doing it as they, as they go and expanding and, and reading books and going to other farms and trying to pick up what they do. So it's interesting that you say that and kind of a cool experience for you that you had family members who got to be that knowledge for you.
David Hopkins: Very beneficial to have, I guess I [00:09:00] got a hundred years worth of experience staring at me, looking at me all the time.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, it probably has its positives and negatives.
David Hopkins: Yeah. positives and negatives. There's always, "I want to do it this way. That's too bad."
Rory Loughran: So I think, especially in terms of the business side of things, what was that education piece like? Did that, was that something they dove into? Because I think something that we find a lot of times is, that's something farmers are missing is the business education side of learning how to farm.
David Hopkins: Business-wise, it was always, you know, we'd pick it, pack it, and sell it and you know, I told my dad I was like, I wanna take a box and put a bunch of different stuff in it and sell it to somebody. He said, " you can do that all you want to, that'd be fine."
We're focused on a whole semi-load of bell pepper leaving here, not a box of, you know, a mixed box of stuff. So I just kinda got out there on my own and started doing that. The first week I sold one box to one lady after I'd sent 60 something letters in the mail "Hey, I want to start doing this. Are you interested in buying one?" And [00:10:00] then after that, it took off a little bit, wasn't doing a whole lot. Kinda kept growing and just anything we could do, we'd still try to sell anybody right now.
Rory Loughran: What kind of led you to sign up for Barn2Door in the first place and where did that interest come from?
David Hopkins: Signing up for Barn2Door, we, I don't really know. What was it?
Candace Hopkins: It was in 2020 when everything went down, that's when our business just exploded and we were just super, super busy. So what we were doing just wasn't working for us with how many customers we had. One of our customers actually sent us a link to the Barn2Door and I just started researching that and anyways, just learn more about it and it seemed like a perfect fit for us.
Rory Loughran: What were you guys doing before? Just curious.
David Hopkins: We had a uh, some cat. I don't remember who the guy's name was. He made websites for a living and he had done some work for my cousin for one of her websites, for another family business, and I told them I needed a website and I wanted to start selling stuff [00:11:00] online and he made me one. And it worked for a little while, when you had 30 or 40 people it was fine,
Candace Hopkins: It would use Paypal.
David Hopkins: There was no organization, wouldn't sort it out for you. We had to go through each name by names and we can organize it all together. And then we'd found Barn2Door a little bit easier when it's all this locations getting this.
Rory Loughran: So then how was that transition? Because I'm sure that was a big transition for you guys, just migrating systems and things. How did that go?
Candace Hopkins: We did like the onboarding and it was like, as soon as that, it just, everything worked out. I don't think we had like any problems. It just, it was so easy and that was good as we were going through a super busy time, we did that in the middle of being so busy.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. And I'm curious, how did that go for your customers too? How did they deal with that, that change or that switch?
David Hopkins: I don't think anybody had any trouble except the older generation that didn't really do it online. [00:12:00] The older people they'd always call me like, "hey David, I want, this." And I'm like, "okay, I'll write it down." You know, please send me an email so I can remember this. I mean, I'm, yeah, it's not the only thing that I do all day long.
We didn't lose too many people. We got them used to starting to order online. And then, now I don't think I have anybody calling me except maybe one or two more older people that still claim that they don't have a computer or internet or anything, but they still hear about us and that what's in the box every week.
Rory Loughran: You know, I think something, you said something earlier about when you originally went to your father and said, I want to, I want to put together a box and sell that directly to some people. And he was like, "yeah, go for it. But this is still gonna be the priority." I think a lot of times with a farm that's a generational farm, sometimes the selling direct to consumer can be a pretty big step and a new thing for a lot of farms. What would maybe be your advice to somebody that is a more generational farm like yours, or that's been around a while and has been doing things a certain way, but like obviously you guys have made a really good transition to selling direct.
What would be your [00:13:00] advice to them?
David Hopkins: My advice is you need to go in and do it. I mean, everything's going this way, and the more people we can get involved in doing this the better it can turn out for everybody. I feel they'll get used to you know, buying directly from your grower, knowing who you're buying your food from. I think that's a pretty big deal. The stuff that we're packing and selling, it doesn't come off our farm all day, every day. The times that it does, I know I've seen this pepper plant from a seed all the way through the greenhouse, setting it out in the field. I laid the plastic, my brother has been watering it, taking care of it, fertilizing it.
We wash to get big, wash to get taken care of. We know where it's coming from and we truly care about it cause it's our livelihoods. We have to have this to keep going, but to the people that, they hadn't started doing direct to consumer yet, if you have the opportunity to do it, it doesn't but one time to just get one person involved and then hopefully they have a good experience and they'll tell somebody and then they'll tell somebody, and then sooner or later, you'll have a full-blown [00:14:00] direct to consumer business. You don't have to worry about the guy that's selling all your other stuff for you. You're selling at yourself and not paying him money just to talk on the phone.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. And I think something that's really key there is I feel like the quality speaks for itself. When people try products that are grown, that aren't shipped across the world to get to their grocery store or something like that, you can really tell the difference. And that makes a big difference for folks.
David Hopkins: When you're getting something from us. Two days at the most from it coming out of a field and being packed on my doorstep or whatever. If it's coming straight off of my farm right now, I'll pick it the day before we put her in a box to sell it to you. If it's coming from Florida, you got a day to get up here or whatever. It's coming to North Carolina, you might have a day, day and a half. You know, as quick as they can get from the farm to your table is what we're trying to do.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's the goal. Well, you guys have also done a really good job of keeping a super simple product inventory on your online store. You guys [00:15:00] utilize the box, like we've talked about here, doing a farmer's choice type of bundle and some subscriptions and that's how you sell all your produce.
So how has that simplified things for you? Especially Candace for you on the, on the store management side of things, how has that kept things simple for you?
Candace Hopkins: I feel like for a little bit, we thought should we give the customer the option of what they want, but, we just can't, we can't make that happen. And so we do let our customers know that if there's one or two items or, you know, that they just don't like, we can substitute that out. They can leave a note in the box when they check out. But other than that, we just, we try to keep it simple because that's just, that would be too much on, on everybody.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. And it sounds, with how much you guys are growing the box, if you were doing choice, people would have so many choices.
David Hopkins: They'd have so many options and it'd be just, more or less, it'd be hard to find your box and the truck once we pack it all and send it in and they're like, oh man, it could be in Tallahassee, but it's supposed to be in Thomasville.[00:16:00]
Rory Loughran: That would definitely create some problems. I know you just mentioned that you thought about doing some, like, à la carte or like individual ordering. Have you guys always pretty much just done the boxes and been able to stick to that?
David Hopkins: Pretty much. When I started doing it the first time I think, I'm pretty sure the first box I offered was a $50 box that was a full one or a ninth bushel that will be pack eggplant in. And I was targeting like bigger families that had three or four plus kids. I was like, this is good for six people.
I got a couple of people to do that, and then they're like "do you have a smaller box?" So now I started doing a half bushel box and that was for three or four people, and then I started packing boxes for another man in Albany. He showed up with a bag one day, I said, "what are you doing with that?" He said "Well I'm going to sell this to people that just have one or two people we're going to do a bag option or whatever."
And I said, "that's a fantastic idea." So now we do bags and I think our bags are our biggest seller. The real thing is though, not [00:17:00] everybody cooks as much as they used to. We're bad about that too. We don't get to cook every night, we're too busy, everybody's too busy. So the bags is a good option. If you go and cook one or two meals a week, you know that's perfect for you, you got enough produce to do that. We started doing that and it's been good.
Rory Loughran: Do you guys ever run into any problems with like we keep saying, you guys grow so much, do you guys ever run into issues of people saying, like, "I don't know how to use any of this." And if you have run into that, how do you get around it?
David Hopkins: I tell them our secret family recipes to every single item, and they said they don't have any idea how to do it and 9 times out of 10, it's a green, like a mustards, turnips, collards, kale. The Hopkins Family is bad about having a family getting together and having a pot of greens. There's not a time that we have a sit-down family dinner and somebody didn't cook a pot of collards or something for our dinner.
And everybody's like, "what do we do with these? You know, We're not from around here, we're from up north or something." And I was like, "let me tell you how to cook some collards", and I'll sit there and talk to him for a little while it just share with 'em how we enjoy them and I'll tell them what [00:18:00] Candace does at the house with kale or something or any kind of vegetable.
My mother, she helps us on the, you know, farm to table thing. She does some delivering and I'm sure she's shared all of her family recipes too. So we just always try to share, you know, we'd cook it ourselves so we can try to give them a good idea of how to use it themselves.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, I think that's really key because I know a lot of farmers will we'll include recipes like that in, in newsletters or on their social media. You guys are the best at knowing how to cook what you produce, because it's what you're eating everyday too and I think that's the same for protein farmers, it's the rib-eyes and the pork shoulders that stuff gets sold.
At what point did you guys, you started with the box and now you offer the box as a subscription, so people can get that, kind of, every single week if they want. What, at what time did you guys decide to start doing subscriptions and what is the result of that been?
David Hopkins: Subscriptions weren't even an option before Barn2Door. I think we started doing Barn2Door when subscriptions were an option. We had people that wanted them every week and said, "hey, just, I'm going to get one every week. Just make sure you remember to put me on the list." [00:19:00] And that happened, 9 times out of 10, but every now and then be like, "oh man, I forgot to do that one."
So we always make a couple extra boxes just in case, but uh, the subscription thing it's worked out good and keep people coming back and we really enjoy their support and that's good stuff too.
Rory Loughran: And on the management side too, Candace, simplifies that process as well for you.
Candace Hopkins: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't know if we have a, we don't have a huge amount of subscription people, but, but it does make it easier for those that want to get every week.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's awesome. So then you guys also, with the launch of a lot of your direct to consumer stuff, you started delivery as well. How did that kind of start up and what was getting started with delivery like?
David Hopkins: I'm going to say delivery started with people forgetting to pick up their boxes. So it was like, "hey, I got your box for you."
Candace Hopkins: We will hunt you down.
David Hopkins: And when we first started doing it, we weren't collecting the money up front, you know, I was depending on you to, give me your money when I gave you your box. And people would, you know, sometimes [00:20:00] forget, which is understandable people are busy, they work, do everything. So I was like, "hey, where you at? I'll bring them to you."
And then finally it was like, "hey, we're going to start off in delivery for this price on top of your box. You don't have to worry about coming to me. I'm going to bring straight to you." And then we started doing that and I think delivery we do about half and half.
It's been good too. You know, we got to drive all over tarnation sometimes, but we got our zone and narrowed it down and people can understand where we're going to go to and where we can't go to. So we would try to accommodate everybody regardless. If it's a little too far we'll still try to do it.
Rory Loughran: I've been curious on the growth of that. Did you guys do a lot of zones at first and then . Kind of reign it back in? Or what was that experience like?
Candace Hopkins: We did. We had it just basically, I guess we just said anywhere. And then, once we got a lot of customers who were like, " we can't really do that." It was a lot, so we had to narrow it down.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely, and it's a lot of time. Do you guys, have you guys charged a delivery fee to compensate yourselves for that time? Or [00:21:00] do you build that into the cost of products or how do you go about that?
David Hopkins: We started doing delivery, I think it was like $5 a box or something, and then during COVID, which was a crazy time, but a blessing for us. They'd gotten like, we were having to do, I don't even know how many deliveries, it was ridiculous. So we were like, "hey, it's $10 to deliver now. If you want it still, we will bring it to you." But we went to $10 and then with the way fuel is right now, it's got to stay at $10. We can't be driving everywhere for nothing. The gas cost a little something on that car.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. And your time costs a little something too.
David Hopkins: Yeah, Candace's time is very valuable. Mine can be wasted easily.
Rory Loughran: I was curious too, I know sometimes farmers up their delivery charge, which is completely reasonable. All the costs associated with doing delivery, none of those are going down. But I think sometimes the consumers don't react in a great way. How did they kind of respond to you guys raising that delivery fee?
Candace Hopkins: Oh, we had some, some people that were happy about it.
David Hopkins: We had some negative reviews from some people that were [00:22:00] just all the way too far away, that, you know, "they got too big and they don't care about the little people anymore." We care about you, we just can't drive 45 minutes to bring you a $10 box when, you know, it also costs $10 worth of fuel. You can't make everybody happy. You do your best and we love all our customers and want to do anything we can to make them happy. We just, we realize that we cannot make everybody happy.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, I think that's definitely a good mentality to have and similar to what we were talking about with all the options that you can put in a box...
David Hopkins: I would love to make it like a grocery store where you could get exactly what you wanted every time, but the logistics and the piecing together of boxes and this and that, it would just, you know, maybe in the future one day I'll have enough help and enough sense to be able to be that. But right now I just, I can't figure it out.
Rory Loughran: So I'm curious, what would your advice be? I think a lot of farms right now are realizing the potential that doing home delivery has and how much that can kind of add to their, their [00:23:00] revenue. I'm curious, what would be your advice to a farm that's thinking about starting up delivery?
David Hopkins: I'd do it. I mean, depends on what kind of area you're in too, when you think about South Georgia, we're pretty much rural areas. I mean, we got a lot of back roads, a lot of small towns, Thomasville is a decent sized town, Cairo is not that big. Tallahassee, huge of course.
I always looked at it as that's one more box I could sell versus somebody coming to me. So why not go do it? If it doesn't take you a whole nother hour to go do that, you know, your money ahead doing that. And then you might even sell another piece of a box that you were breaking down to do that in delivery, instead of just having to donate that or dump it into the pile of mulch or whatever.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. And I, you just mentioned Tallahassee there. Cause I, I know a lot of farms, they, they are in rural areas, but if there's a good, big metropolitan area nearby like that, they can tap into that market. Is that kinda what you guys have done with Tallahassee [00:24:00] and how has that gone for you?
David Hopkins: You know, I don't have any idea how I got started in Tallahassee, cause I started in Thomasville. I guess it was all word of mouth. Somebody was like, "hey, do you come to Tallahassee?" I was like, "sure do, where do you meet at?" My sister works for a business that has a location in Tallahassee, I was like, "hey, I want to use the parking lot, you know, one day a week, I'll be out of the way out back, don't worry about me." He was like, "yeah, sure, come on." So we started doing it in Tallahassee and Tallahassee's been good for us too.
Rory Loughran: Is that where you see the most growth out of all the areas that you're serving with delivery and everything?
David Hopkins: It fluctuates up and down, some weeks we'll have the most boxes in our small town of Cairo, some weeks be in Tallahassee, and sometimes in Thomasville. It just depends, you know, with the school systems and people in school, are they out of school right now? Towards the beginning of the year, when we get started back after Christmas and the New Year, we take a month off or really the month and a half off.
We take that off and then there's a big influx and it comes up and then kids get out of school and everybody starts traveling, so it's going to go down. [00:25:00] Summer gardens come in. April, still have a garden around here, so you kind of lose a little bit right there. When they come back into school in the Fall, it picks up a little bit and kind of climbs all the way to, November to Thanksgiving. So it just, you know, it depends on week to week, who's in town, which schools on Spring Break and summer vacations and stuff like that.
Rory Loughran: I wanted to talk a little bit about your guys' social media, because you guys have a pretty strong following on Facebook and Instagram. What's your approach there? How are you guys managing social media?
Candace Hopkins: I guess I do most of the social media...
David Hopkins: Or all of it.
Candace Hopkins: So I don't know. I feel like a lot of our following comes from like, we try to, or I try to post like more personal stuff like of our families and like what David's doing during the day or what Ben's doing. And I feel like that really grabs people's attention, and so I try to do more posts like that. Instagram isn't as big as Facebook, I don't think. I need to get on Instagram more, but it's a pretty big one.
David Hopkins: We [00:26:00] got a lot of stuff going on around here all the time. There's always something to find, to see what we're doing around here. We always got something.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, I think that's really true of, of a lot of farms, is that there's always things going on. It's just a matter of grabbing your phone and snapping a picture of it...
David Hopkins: That's right. Just take a picture and figure out what you want to say in a minute.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, but Candace to what you were saying too, I think . That authenticity of what's going on with your family, that kind of really actually getting to see the farmer and what they're doing is so important because it's almost, I think in today's day, it's almost as important as what David, what you were saying, with being able to grow the things and that you have so much you contribute to the entire process of your customers getting that pepper. It's almost like the customer kind of gets to see that through social media.
I'm curious with you guys with your email marketing as well. Have you guys utilized the MailChimp integration much, and do you use email marketing to stay in contact with those customers and keep them up to date on everything?
Candace Hopkins: Yes. We send [00:27:00] out an email every Sunday night through MailChimp like our weekly newsletter, we call it, and it basically has in there, it'll show you our different options and then we'll put in there what we're going to offer that week in the box.
David Hopkins: It's got a link to go to our store so you can buy something right, you know, make it easy, make it simple, just click on it, you can purchase right here. We don't want to have too many steps. You don't have to go anywhere else. Just click and ready to get it.
Rory Loughran: Well, uh, you guys are the newest additions to our Farm Advisor Network. What are you guys excited for about, about joining the team?
David Hopkins: We want to soak up some information from other people too, and kind of learn what's been, what they've done to make their Barn2Door, their farm to table program successful. We're always in for new ideas. We're in South Georgia, so we can pretty much grow anything. We always looking for more stuff to put in the ground.
We got probably 40 different crops right now, cows and everything else. So I'd like to find a [00:28:00] Barn2Door company or a Barn2Door farm that's doing beef. You know, I want to start selling some beef then I wanna, maybe one day get maybe some poultry, maybe some chickens, or something and start selling chickens too, just whatever, whatever we can find keep going. We wanna, we want to keep going and keep growing.
Rory Loughran: I know you guys partner with some other farms to kind of offer produce pretty much year round, I believe. Could you maybe talk about how you've gone about establishing those partnerships with other farms?
David Hopkins: Well, when I started it, started the farm to table as I called it or CSA. I learned about it in Auburn, Alabama when I went to school over there. So we're, you know, going through, I can scrap up some and, you know, put in a box and sell it. And then people said well, you know, "why just stop. I want to keep going. Why, Why did you quit?" And I was like, "well, guess what? The way the world turns, it got too hot and that pepper burned up. Now I'll get through cold next and that pepper is going to freeze."
So where we're at, we can offer two crops a year and we'll start picking pepper and tomatoes and stuff. Probably about another three weeks [00:29:00] and we'll be able to pick for maybe a month, maybe five, six weeks at the most, depending on the weather. We're always at mercy to the weather. The way it works on the East coast, produce starts in South Florida, beginning of the year, when Florida comes in, they start picking.
About the time they wrap up, maybe one or two weeks left in the picking, it'll, our stuff will start coming on and they'll be ready for us. And then we'd pick our whole turn. And then when we're about to start wrapping up, hopefully it all works out, we'll be just about finished and North Carolina come in. So they'll never have a break in the produce, you know? We kind of share the market. We have a relationship with people up and down the East coast.
My dad's been fortunate enough to do it for his whole life. He knows just a pile of people. He can go anywhere riding around, he enjoys his Sunday afternoon drives. But when you know people in South Florida that we can buy tomatoes from, because the guy that's coming to pick our tomatoes, he's working on a [00:30:00] farm down there right now picking tomatoes and he'll be up here and like I said, two, three weeks.
So if I need tomatoes, I can say, "hey, I need a pallet of tomatoes for this week" and he'll send me a pallet so I can, have fresh tomatoes from him. And then when he leaves us, he goes to North Carolina. So I know where he's going up there and he's actually started farming on his own.
So he has a little bit of pepper and tomatoes up there in North Carolina too. So it just, it moves and it's been easier and we can offer this thing year round. We don't have to shut down. We have to quit during the winter right there, when it freezes out us, and freezes out North Carolina, everything goes to the Yucatan peninsula or Mexico.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's awesome and I like how you kind of have used that and use those partnerships and those relationships to extend your own growing season, which is really cool.
I guess looking ahead to the next year, what do you guys see as what's next for Hopkins Farms? I know you guys just moved into the house there, but what else is kind of on the horizon for you guys?
David Hopkins: Well, we have a, another child coming in August, so we're kind of waiting on [00:31:00] that right now. We make it through this Spring crop and start laying plastic for the Fall crop. Hopefully everything will work out and have good markets and everything. Keep going. We're looking forward to another year of being able to do this, so I'll come home some nights and just be mad as fire. This day just went way different than I had planned this morning. But at the end of the day, I'm glad that I'm doing this. I'm glad I got my wife with me that she's supports me and lets me, complain to her every now and Yeah, got two little boys that maybe one day they'll want to do it, but hopefully they got better sense than I.
Rory Loughran: That's probably exactly what your dad said.
David Hopkins: That's exactly what he said.
Rory Loughran: Candace, how about you? What are some of your goals for the year ahead, other than having your baby.
Candace Hopkins: Yeah. that's a pretty big one, but pretty much David said just, hopefully we could grow our farm to table business a little more, get it back to, obviously it won't be back to where it was, but
David Hopkins: We'd like to find some more markets to get in. We actually do a frozen vegetable sale now, [00:32:00] too. And we're trying to find some more places to go with that and just keep growing and keep expanding our name and finding people that would like to enjoy some fresh priorities.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. Awesome.
I want to extend my thanks to Candace and David for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of farms across the country, including farmers like the Hopkins who implement sustainable agricultural practices and support their local communities. For more information on Hopkins Farms, you can visit hopkinsfarmsinc.com. To learn more about Barn2Door, including access to numerous free resources and best practices for your farm, you can go to barndoor.com/resources. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
[00:33:00]