Best Lift Kits On The Market

Remember, you need to have a product that enough customers want and are willing to pay for at a fair price to leave you with enough profit at the end of the day to make it worth undertaking.

Taxis provide a service. Mechanics, pet groomers, personal shoppers, car washers—these are services. Where some customers may love the farmers market ritual, others may not be able to commit to being there every Saturday morning.

By providing a simple and easy-to-construct harvest calendar to display at your stand, you can show your customers what vegetables and fruits are currently in-season and give them a preview of what to expect during the months ahead.

A simple blog can help people follow along with your farm's seasonal goings-on while keeping customers up to date on what products you'll have available at the next market. What should you put on your website?

“We sell them in plastic containers, with the strawberry baskets holding them up in the water. Try not to cut into the main woody stems. “We pick all the fresh herbs early in the morning and put them directly in water,” says Mary Ocasion of Churn...

Baby Spinach It takes some practice and skills to grow great baby spinach, as it is easily swallowed by weeds. Once you master the growing part, though, market this crop to restaurants year round and charge well for it.

Beautify the Tables Tables should have tablecloths. Chalkboards generally look better than dry erase boards. Fresh, plentiful and attractively displayed: These concepts help draw customers and get them engaged with your business.

If you choose this approach or even if you follow a more traditional growing schedule, you can sell many items at farmers markets before your main crops are ready to harvest. Resale Items (New or Vintage) Cookie Cutters Vintage Glass Rolling Pins Marbles...

Keep Summer Crops Coming Certainly, customers expect and want tables piled high with carrots, sweet potatoes, broccoli and Brussels sprouts, but as long as you can keep tomatoes coming, they won't complain.

One last note: Offer an individual price per squash and a buck price per unit to encourage them to purchase more. Add a couple of more storage crops and a couple of fresh greens, and you could go all winter.

If you can push lettuce or spinach into the summertime or deep into the winter, you can have a great market. Some of these can be incorporated midseason, while others take some planning.

I like doing this in berry containers, as long as the smaller cukes are priced well enough to make up for the lost profit of a fully grown cucumber. A lot of larger growers package their cucumbers individually.

For restaurants, start talking to chefs in the winter about growing these. These do not have to be mutually exclusive—the price by volume can be the same price as individually. Ensuring they maintain their good looks at market is your biggest challenge,...

Offer a hesitant customer a clove or even the scape of a hardneck garlic variety to take home and try. They recognize the white papery shroud on softneck garlic, but are immediately enchanted by the colors of hardneck garlic and the size of elephant garlic.

Hot, steamy Indiana weather can also impact attendance and buying. For South Circle Farm, this is a little less likely as it is still owned by a nonprofit organization. The intensive growing approach allows them to focus on producing organic crops that...

“As the market for local and organic foods continues to grow and diversify, small-scale farmers stand ready to reap the benefits,” explains Ali Berlow, food authority and author of The Food Activist Handbook: Big & small things you can do to help...

You can experiment with selling it and ask chefs, but ultimately baby arugula will sell best. As with anything, you need to consider your cost of production when pricing arugula. You can find a lot of businesses—including small bakeshops and artisan...

If planning to offer food samples, you might need to attend a food-safety class. Keep Your Food Cool Cold food should be kept cold. If the dried herbs are crumbled into a jar, they're considered processed.

Good Photos Give You Social Media Fodder Posting regularly on your social media is a great way to grow your audience and retain regular engagement. Photography is one of those areas.

Other favorites were tomatoes (66 percent), melons (30 percent), apples (18 percent), beans (16 percent) and peaches (13 percent). Traveling at 50 mph, motorists have three scant seconds to size up a roadside attraction, so do what you can to make your...

Work with your own material to intimately understand its pros and cons. Be sure to ask how long processing will take. Some social media tools cross post, for instance, posting a single photo to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in one click, so you don't...

You'll want to determine how customers plan to purchase juice. Other investments you will have are permit fees, vendor fees, printing and labels, juicing equipment, labor, and facility rental fees, if you need a commercial kitchen.

In addition to providing education and legal advice on raw-milk production, it tracks raw-milk statutes across the country. The raw-foods/whole-foods community is just that: a community.

Share Recipes People love to know what to do with your food. Have fun with it. Many social media options exist, and they're all pretty easy. Finding new customers at the same time?

It's one thing to chase the goats out of the strawberry patch, but explaining to people why they can't park on the hayfield is something else entirely. Greenbank Farm, a CSA and vineyard in the Pacific Northwest, hosts an annual poetry festival on the...

In fact, according to recent findings by a team of University of California, Davis-based researchers, community-supported agriculture has taken hold in the region, providing farmers a profitable direct-marketing outlet and consumers access to food from...

Pricing Structures This is certainly a less obvious way to add value to a market table, but pricing is an overlooked part of the market experience—usually decided on a whim—that can work for you or against you.