The Challenge of Direct Marketing
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
With wholesale prices back to the farmer so low that margins are hard to come by, will more farmers start considering direct marketing? It’s easier said than done says Tyler Nuss of Nuss Farms. The family has experimented with direct approaches like marketing a box of squash shipped in the mail.
Nuss… “ We had specialty squash that we shipped around the country, which was, man, did that warm my heart to just be able to like, share a little bit of Nuss Farms because our customers are processors for the most part, right? So to be able to ship something to someone in Maine and they get Nuss Farms produce to their door is really cool. I think the challenge as you can imagine, is where to invest and the return you're gonna get on an investment like that, right? We are, we're farming about 1300 acres at, vegetables at scale, right? So to think about, the scale to take one of our fields, which we're in like 50 acre, probably average fields. That's some serious produce. So to, to move that or, segment off a field, it's how much is that gonna return, right? You have to have scale. And I think this is the tricky part.”
Nuss has been working with LocalLine to sell some vegetables direct to food service customers like Chipotle.
