A (Not So) Funny Thing Happened To Our Original “Value-Added Journey” Blog

I’ve been blogging about our Journey into Value-Added Farm Products for quite a while, but last fall our blog service shut down rather suddenly. I actually lost quite a few posts, and it sent us scrambling to reconstruct all the writing that we’d lost. Anyway, this is our "ReBlog." You’ll notice that everything was posted in one day, even though it was written over a long period of time. I’ve actually rearranged the sequence of the original posts so that it reads better. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Introduction

Hi I'm Billie Jean Salle, of Salle Orchards. My husband Nicholas and I own and operate a beautiful small farm in Wheatland , CA which is approximately 35 miles northeast of Sacramento.

We are absolutely in love with the dirt we live on and are very proud of what we do for a living – farming. However it is a constant uphill battle to survive. We are always challenged with the elements and especially lately the economy. It seems we have all kinds of ideas and dreams of where we would like to take the business but we just can't get ahead enough financially to expand our product line.

Gardening between the walnut trees

Being our land is planted with trees, we are committed to the crops we already have, but what we can do with those crops is our future. Our dream to saving our livelihood is in our Value Added Products (VAP) line. With a small grant from the Western SARE Farmer/Rancher Grant program, we are expanding into new territory. We are going to be sun drying some of our tree fruits and candying our walnuts. I will share our experiences, success and failures with you on this learning journey, and hopefully help you to expand your profitability and decrease your losses as well.

peach blossoms

Graphic Design

We work with an absolutely wonderful independent designer named Arlene Graham of Digitalgraham Design. 

Arlene grew up on a corn/soybean/beef cattle farm in rural Iowa that's been in her family since 1886. Now residing in Placer County, California, Arlene and her husband James document rural life through graphic design, photography and video.

Arlene's father and grandfather haying with the cousins on their Iowa farm in the 1920s.

Arlene works with arts, agriculture and tourism clients developing creative marketing and advertising solutions — including ads, brochures, posters, packaging, exhibits and direct mail. Her artistic and graphic style is well-suited for creating visual marketing materials for our family farm that reflect our sense of place and the pride we have in our product.

Arlene's design work helps small farms and ranches create an attractive and memorable visual impression of their agricultural enterprises.

Our Marketing Consultant

Christina loves to help farmers promote locally grown produce.

Our marketing consultant, Christina Abuelo, is an experienced nonprofit consultant and farmers’ market organizer. As executive director of an inner city agency on the East Coast, she increased the operating budget by tenfold over four years and developed an array of well-regarded programs in education, housing and health promotion. 

As the market manager for a group of farmers' markets in Northern California, she quintupled the budget and significantly increased the group’s profile in the media and the community. In addition, she worked with individual vendors to promote their products more effectively and has developed publicity campaigns, tasting events, media outreach, newspaper articles and special events.

For this project, Christina created copy and provided art direction for marketing materials, produced email newsletters, created and updated the farm’s website, contributed product recipes and conducted research for supply purchases.

Website & Email Newsletter

Probably my biggest handicap is lack of computer skills...if it wasn't for this blog, I probably would still be learning how to "boot" up the system.

However I do know the importance of a website. Maximum exposure is a must in this competitive business world today. I'll tell you, we would be lost without Christina, with her experience in marketing and computer knowledge we now have a very beautiful site in working progress.

Sometimes a new set of eyes can see the beauty in the everyday things that we take for granted. Like buckets of fruit waiting to be packed. She made it look so inviting on the website. We realize we have overlooked a lot of potential marketing tools that were here all along.

For instance a simple newsletter and email signup sheet. Once we put a sign-up sheet out at our farmers' market booth, people were all over it and now we have hundreds of customers waiting for their monthly Farm News. They like to feel connected with a little slice of farm life. Christina has designed a newsletter informing customers of the markets we are attending, what is in season and how the crops are progressing. She inserts recipes, a few health facts and - everyone's favorite - a coupon. The coupons could be tailored for a specific crop that needs to be moved. For example, we did a "heatwave special" on tomatoes and peaches

The Salle Orchards Website

Electronic Newsletter

Farm Logo & Collateral Materials

Our original logo was a simple outline of a walnut tree.

When we purchased our walnut farm in 1990, my father, a gifted amateur artist, designed a very simple yet attractive logo for us as a surprise gift. What a perfect way to kick off our new life. We loved our tree from the start, and we initially used it on our business cards.

 

Our marketing consultant Christina was enthusiastic about the logo and encouraged us to incorporate it into all aspects of the business.  A good logo, she told us, is the image that represents a company without necessarily displaying the name or product. (Think of the Nike logo.) It inspires a sense of confidence in customers that the business is worthy of their patronage. A quality logo is iconic and is used on every conceivable medium that a customer could see - from letterhead to website to promotional materials.



Our original logo was turned over to our graphic designer Arlene, and the results stunned us. She added colors, filled in the tree, and added a banner with our name and the phrase “family-owned since 1990.” She presented us with different design options, and we agreed on one version to be used on all our banners, business cards and flyers.

Arlene updated the original design with color, the banner on the bottom and the words.

Great logos should look good in black and white too.

 

We proudly wear our farm’s logowear – tee-shirts, sweatshirts, caps and aprons – to all our markets and special events. Our farmers’ market employees all wear logowear, and this contributes to our booth’s “look” and perception of professionalism. We made shirts which combined our logo with assorted taglines such as “Got Fruit?” “Eat Fresh” “Farmers’ Daughter” and “Next Generation Farmer.” We even have sold some shirts to our customers, who now serve as walking billboards for our farm. 

 

For our business name, Arlene selected a distinctive font called Nueva, a modern typeface that has interesting calligraphic features. It goes well with the logo.

Front of my business card

 

 

We have made banners for our market booths with our tree logo as the central visual element:

Above, the banner design from Arlene Graham. Below, the banner hanging in the back of our stall.
It's printed on a matte mesh fabric for less wind resistance, so it's more stable.

The banner, hanging in the back of our market stall.

 

All our packaged product labels are designed around the tree as the focal point. 

Label for bag of walnuts

Farmers' Market schedule

Arlene and Christina collaborated to make this beautiful 2-sided flyer which we hand out at our farm stand, farmers' markets and festivals.

Flyer Front

Flyer Back

 

Since our logo is now ubiquitous, the tree has become a recognizable symbol to our customer base. Based on customer feedback, I believe that that symbol has translated into customer trust and, ultimately, increased sales.

A Visit to Cousin Tom

At the beginning of the project, we visited our cousin Tommy Tomich for a lesson in drying fruit. Born on his family farm about 85 years ago, Tom served in World War II and has farmed ever since.

He has a farm much like ours, with seasonal fruits that he sells direct to the public. But he does not have refrigeration to store extra fruit, so he dries his surplus fruit for fall and winter sales. We spent a couple of hours talking about old times and watching while his workers were cutting and readying the fruit for drying. I was surprised how simple it is and went away wondering why we haven't been drying all along.

Right around that time, we saw an ad in the back of an ag magazine for used drying trays. We drove to the Central Valley to pick them up from a retiring farmer. They were very old and needed repair; some we couldn’t salvage. But the price was right!