Famers need to get closer to customers to thrive in today’s market, say experts at a recent conference.
About 50 people assembled at the Westin Edmonton last week for the second-ever Buyer Aware conference on agri-food. The conference, the second in a three-part series, was organized by the Alberta Agriculture and Food Council to ferret out trends in agricultural marketing.
Today’s farmer is often far removed from the customer, said Rich Smith, general manager of Alberta Beef Producers and a speaker at the conference, which makes it tough for them to spot market signals. “For a while, people just wanted fairly priced food,” he said in an interview; now, they’re looking for other features such as quality, safety, nutrition and local production.
“But the bottom line is they still want it to be affordable,” he continued. While Wal-Mart and other forces demand big, efficient farms, consumers are calling for smaller, more personal ones.
The local market is completely different from the international one, said Jessie Radies, founder of Original Fare (an Edmonton-based consortium of restaurants) and local food advocate. It’s not driven by efficiency, mass sales or monocultures, but taste, value and relationships.
Those markets are not mutually exclusive, she said. Spring Creek Ranch in Vegreville still sells internationally, for example, but also has a separate hormone-free line that it sells locally for a higher price. “They need to be complementary.”
There are about 27,000 beef producers in Alberta, Smith said, and not all of them are equipped to sell locally. Beef producers will need to achieve high standards of safety, quality and environmental responsibility to appeal to customers abroad. “We don’t think we can be the lowest cost provider of beef, but we can be a very competitive provider of high quality beef.”
Farmers also need more effective ways of getting local food to customers, Radies said. “We want local food, consumers and restaurateurs do,” but the only way they can get it now is through farmers’ markets. The local Good Food Box program she’s working with could be the answer; it delivers locally produced food to people on a subscription basis.
The next conference is this March in Leduc. A policy paper on agricultural marketing will follow it. For details, visit www.agfoodcouncil.com.
About a hundred young Albertans will rock out this weekend as they learn how to get ahead on the farm.
The Future Agricultural Business Builders (FABB) is holding their fifth annual Rock the Farm conference this weekend in Edmonton. About a hundred farmers aged 18 to 40 are expected to be there to hear about how to start and maintain their lives in the fields.
Farming can be a challenging occupation, said Stuart Austin, chair of FABB, so challenging that some parents discourage their kids from getting into it. “I’ve had it said to me openly that they don’t wish that upon our generation.”
Steep costs also keep many farms from getting off the ground — the land alone often costs millions. But digital technology has also made farming much easier than it was in the past, he continued, as has incorporation. Alberta’s Harvest Moon Acres started off as a partnership between six farmers, he said as an example, and is now a thriving 13,000-acre operation with its own agronomist. “It’s a great way to diversify your business and become more viable.”
The conference will run sessions on these topics and others from Jan. 22 to 24 at the Edmonton Mayfield Inn. To register, visit www.fabb.ca.
