direction to take, a strategy.
I wish I could be more specific here, but there are hundreds and hundreds of specialty food products, each one with its own wants and needs. There are just too many variables to give more detailed directions about marketing specific products, or even product categories. Besides, you need to do this anyway. It’s part of your microfarm education.
Other Ideas for Your Microfarm, Some Crazy
Agritourism rules! Since my wife and I can never enjoy a normal vacation, like lying on the beach reading trashy novels, or seeing all the cathedrals in Spain, we have essentially become agritourists. In that capacity, we have visited fascinating agriculturally related places all over the world. I mention these to give potential microfarmers ideas of how they might exploit the agritourism aspects of their farm. As the Small Farm Center at the University of California notes, “Agricultural tourism or agritourism, is one alternative for improving the incomes and potential economic viability of small farms and rural communities.” We shopped for Scotch bonnet peppers in the produce markets of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, then snuck into the ganja fields, and we kept our balance when we visited the steeply sloped herb fields of Paramin, Trinidad, and then examined a Congo pepper plantation with ganja fields next door. (The agricultural Caribbean is like that!) And of course, we went to the Royal Botanic Garden in Port of Spain, and the Botanic Station in Tobago, where the first superhot chiles probably originated. We bought bags of peppercorns at a black pepper plantation in Costa Rica and visited the rain-soaked red habanero fields of the aptly-named town of Los Chiles.
In Italy, after visiting the Olive Oil Museum near Lake Garda, we stayed in an agriturismo stone house in the middle of a vineyard, visited an olive-pressing factory, a grappa-making plant, the largest ornamental chile field in the world, and met a pack of truffle-hunting puppies on a farm outside of Parma. We also stayed on a microfarm near Bardi in Emilia Romagna, owned and managed by Maurizio Bovi and Luisa Sgarbossa. The couple purchased and remodeled an old rock-built farmhouse named Ca’d’Alfieri that they run as a bed and breakfast and also a restaurant for the guests. They grow fruit and vegetables that they sell at markets around northern Italy, raise farm animals including black pigs, and live off the land they own and work. In Germany, we visited numerous breweries of varying sizes, and sticking with beer, visited a hop processing plant and museum.
Michael Coelho and Dave DeWitt in the Herb Fields of Paramin, 1992.
Photo by Mary Jane Wilan.
In Mexico, we cooked mole sauce in the middle of a farm of chile plants grown only in Oaxaca, shopped in numerous outdoor markets including Mexico City’s enormous La Merced, the largest retail traditional food market in the city of nine million people. We went out to catch hamachi (yellowtail) with the local fishermen in Baja in a ponga boat (that’s called harvesting from nature), and visited with a tilapia and neem tree farmer in Yucatán. On another trip to Yucatán, we visited the habanero chile fields, sorting and processing plants, and the laboratories devoted to that crop in Mérida.
On our culinary tour of India, led by England’s King of Curries, Pat Chapman, we watched paneer cheese being made in the open kitchen at the Shikarbadi Hunting Lodge in Udaipur, took cooking lessons, and enjoyed the meals that were specially prepared for us by the head chefs of the Taj Hotel Group. Singapore was market after market, each representative of the major population groups of the country: Chinese, Malay, and Indian. No, there was not a British market. We took cooking classes, had a drink at Raffles Hotel, and ate fish-head soup.
The Chile Pepper Institute’s teaching and demonstration garden at New Mexico State University. Photo courtesy of NMSU.
In Johor Bahru, Malaysia, we shopped in a mall supermarket and discovered two forty-foot aisles of racks eight feet high filled only with chile sauces and pastes. Some of the best spicy food we ate in Asia was in Thailand, so we had to go to the wholesale market and see their gigantic display of chile peppers packed every way you can imagine. A vendor warned me in sign language not to eat a tiny prik kee nu chile but I just grinned and popped it in my mouth. The vendor just shook her head in amazement that a farangi could actually eat one.
The United States offered us many agritourism delights like the largest produce show in the country in New Orleans, and I marveled at the weird warehouse of Melissa’s, the specialty produce company near L.A. in California, where I could only identify twenty percent of the fruits and vegetables I saw. In the Texas Hill Country, I went on a feral hog hunt and helped smoke some of the delicious pork we, ahem, harvested. We have dropped in on chile farms all over the country, and I did a demonstration on cooking with curries at the Scottsdale Culinary Festival before a crowd of eight hundred in a theater.
And, of course, we have visited a few cactus and succulent microfarms and they were every bit as interesting as botanical gardens, which is precisely what they were—with the exception that every display was for sale. The Demonstration Garden of the Chile Pepper Institute, on the campus of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, gets hundreds—if not thousands—of visitors during the growing season every year who want to see what 150 varieties in the same field look like. There’s no way to count the number of visitors because the field is in the open near Main Street with no fences, and when the pods are ripe, anyone can harvest them. Imagine a field like that as part of your “you pick ‘em” microfarm with, of course, a little more security and a cash register.
Now I will reveal five microfarm ideas with both value-added products and agritourism appeal. As far as I know, none of these really exist, but they could. Some would require a sizable capital investment; others, long hours and weekend work; and one, additional liability insurance. Now, can I write a coherent microplan for each of them? We’ll see.
The Mushroom Grotto and Pâté Factory. Not too many microfarms will have a natural cave on the premises, so you would have to build one like those winding “underground” zoo displays, or the museum designs that take you through the exhibits until you end up in the museum store. Of course, as a mushroom professional, you would not actually be growing them in the displays, but rather in separate, special houses that also could be visited by guests and customers.
It would probably be considered insensitive to hire children dressed like elves to work in the grotto, but I couldn’t resist mentioning the idea. Promotions to draw customers would obviously include Halloween, but don’t forget about Walpurgis Night, a traditional spring festival in central Europe on April 30 or May 1, exactly six months away from Halloween. Legend holds that mushroom fairy rings mark the spots where witches were dancing on that night. You could have a mid-summer mushroom festival modeled after the Telluride, Colorado Shroomfest, now in its thirty-third year. Activities could include mycologists giving mushroom and toadstool identification clinics, a mushroom cook-off contest, hands-on growing workshops, showings of mushroom movies like Shrooms (horror), Know Your Mushrooms (documentary), Attack of the Mushroom People (horror), or Now Forager (drama).
Value-added products for the Grotto Gift Shop include mushroom supplements and nutraceuticals for health, and edible mushroom-growing kits for morels, shiitakes, and oysters. Also, you could sell dried and fresh mushrooms, plug spawn, truffle oils, pâtés, herbal teas, books, and posters. There are dozens and dozens of mushroom-related gifts and accessories, including clothing, candles, art and sculptures, jewelry, magnets, and even lamps.
The Edible Aquarium and Sushi Bar. Everyone’s seen the live lobsters in tanks in the supermarkets, and Asian markets often
