AdAgrA 2021: Hidden Treasure

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Marketing

Kirsten Knecht

Nick Knecht

Better Photos for Your Farm

Are you excited to be at the photography class at Ad Agra 2021?

So how many of you have ever been skiing or snowboarding before?

Have you ever gone to the rental counter where you've rented the skis and they ask what is your experience level?

1, 2, or 3 and it's always tough to know.

I mean it is for me sometimes like what what level am I?

So I just want to try to get a feel of the room, like in your photography experience level.

We're all here learning together, but if you feel like you're in the 1 category, there is no shame in that category.

If you're, if you're number 1, Okay, all right.

I know that makes it feel like you're the expert, but I understand, that's great.

So, as we get into it today, let me just, you already heard about us, but we live, like he said, in middle Tennessee.

I guess that's the thing you say in Tennessee, it's not central, it's middle.

So it's just the 2 of us and our little fur child Hazel, which it's a little small to see there.

We have together a photography business that's primarily run by her and a small home garden that we do together and we work together for Farmer's Friend as we mentioned, which is an agricultural supply company in Middle Tennessee.

And that's just a little bit more about us and Kirsten will tell you what we're going to cover today.

Okay, so the things that we want to talk about today, first off, we're gonna go over camera gear.

And then we are going to go through 4 points or tips for better photos that you can put into action today to make your photos a little better.

And then we're going to go over easy editing techniques to help you take your photos to the next level.

And if we have time, we're also gonna touch on social media and have time for question and answers.

So I'm gonna do the gear section with us first.

Okay, so probably if there's anybody in this room who has a gear set that looks like this, it could be 1 of you number 3 people back there.

And that is totally okay if your gear that you're going into farm photography doesn't look like this.

Because I believe that what's most important is to start with what you have.

And so we're going to talk about gear in that way a little bit.

So whether you have a full-frame digital SLR or mirrorless camera, a point-and-shoot, or a smartphone, you can start taking better photos right now.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

And as a little caveat, I know that these point and shoot cameras, like the 1 in the top right, they're the kind of things that you might have gotten a few years ago, you might still have around.

I want to make a point that I think that smartphones have excelled so rapidly in photography capabilities that they've pretty much rendered point and shoots obsolete.

So I would lean towards suggesting that you use your iPhone or your Android smartphone from the past 2 or 3 years.

In almost every situation, more than that point and shoot camera that you might have in your closet or around or something.

And I'll show you a couple examples of that real quick, just to make that point.

On the left is a photo from the point and shoot camera, on the right a smartphone.

I know the image is small, and even up here it's kind of not very clear.

But even from this, you can tell the smartphone image, it has a lot more dynamic range.

You can see a lot more dark, you can see more reflection in the pavement and in the cars back there.

That's something that the phones are using artificial intelligence and computational photography to enhance things, even if their actual glass and camera stuff isn't maybe as big as the point-and-shoots.

It's small things but all these small things go together to make better photos.

The right 1 from the smartphone, look how much more of the sky you can see, how much more natural the colors are on the houses behind the bike.

And if you could see more detail, the bike just looks more vivid and engaging as well.

And especially when it comes to faces, skin tone.

This 1 on the left, this is not me, This is just some random person on the internet.

I didn't know if you had that question or not, but the guy, well, it's the same guy.

But notice on the right, the skin tones are a lot more balanced.

It has more depth of field where he's standing out from his background, that's just a little sample of some of the power of smartphones today.

While for a lot of you, maybe even most of you, a smartphone can take you 80% of the way you want to go to build your business and make your farm look better with photography.

And it's something as a big plus or pro, it's something that most of us have access to already in 1 way, shape or form.

So a smartphone does come with its own set of pros and cons, but in the pros section it's exciting to see how rapidly the camera quality has improved in just the past few years.

So I would suggest if you're an iPhone person, I don't know all the Android lines so much, but I'm going to say for iPhones, something that I wouldn't get anything older than the 10 if you're just looking for a phone for photography.

Getting a 10, a 10S, the 11, the 12, those are going to be great phones for photography and the newer 1 you get, the more features it's going to have.

1 saying that I really like is a saying that goes, the best camera is the 1 that you have with you.

And that's the beauty of the smartphone, that you often are gonna have it with you to capture those moments that are important.

But what if you want to go to the next level?

What if you or a member of your family has a passion in photography and wants to take it up a notch?

Here's just there's so many options you could consider.

So don't take this as the best option that there ever could be on planet Earth.

But if you were looking to spend around $1, 000 for better photography for your farm, for your business, for your whatever, this could be a good option.

The Canon EOS RP is a mirrorless camera that came out about 2-3 years ago.

It's got some great features and I would pair that, more important than that specific camera, I think a 50mm 1.8, they call it the nifty 50.

50mm is the most similar focal length to what your eye sees.

It's just the best bang for your buck in a lens you can get.

So if you're thinking about getting a lens for a camera and you want to start on a lower budget, get that nifty 50.

It's gonna be way better than the kit lens that comes with the camera that would be like an 18 to 55 zoom lens Or something highly recommend it So a package like that if you got a used EOS RP with that lens around a thousand dollars If you want to go to the next next level You could get a used EOS R and I know this is a zoom lens but it still has a lot of the good features that I like about the nifty-fifty.

But I feel like if you're in the category of wanting to take better pictures for your farm, to build your farm business, then this is an investment that you can definitely count as an investment for your farm that's going to pay itself back over the course of time.

Because in the era that we live in, photography is the way that you show your farm to your clients, and that means a lot.

And in case there's somebody that's interested in that higher option or at least the camera, of that right option, the lens is the majority of that price.

The company that I work for actually has 1 that we're selling, so if you're interested, come talk to me afterwards.

B&H Photos, where I always buy my camera gear.

They're a great company out of New York City.

They're Jewish, they're closed on Sabbath, so you're probably not going to be going to their website on Sabbath anyways, but they're closed.

Adorama is another great, also Jewish, New York company.

B&H has a used department if you wanna go used.

Luke Fisher

Market Stands and Local Wholesales

So today's topic, I just set it on the end of Aunt Pam.

I'll take the liberty to call her Aunt Pam's marketing workshop.

And I will reiterate a few things that she mentioned, that good points that she made.

I'm particularly covering farmers market and local wholesale.

We've been market gardening For as long as we've been married, plus 3 years or so before that?

So yeah, it's been 20, 20, about 11, 12 years now.

So I'll just be sharing something from my experience.

I am by no means an expert, but I have made my primary living by farming for the last market gardening for the last decade and have survived by the Lord's grace somehow.

So as Aunt Pam was saying, the first principle of good market gardening is having a good product.

In the factory engineering world they would call this to pull not push.

Basically grow what you need and grow a good quality product.

Grow something that somebody wants to buy.

I was going to have a slide show with the main points, but I found on my computer I don't have keynote on this computer so you can email me later and I can send you the send you the notes.

Anyway so back to back to the marketing you know why would Why would you go shop at a farmer's market or join a local CSA?

Anybody here ever shopped at a farmer's market?

You do it because you want, that's 1 of the reasons is quality.

So, so customers want fresh produce and it should look and taste good.

So if you are new to gardening, you know, first, basically how I got into market gardening is I grew up on a family farm.

And we, and my dad runs a feed store and he when I was a kid he would he had a asparagus business and he would sell asparagus some local some wholesale we'd also plant a lot of tomatoes and we'd sell extra tomatoes at the feed store and extra sweet corn.

So basically anything you can grow well you can probably sell.

So just start by growing a home garden and if you start growing more than you can eat then you can consider transitioning into market gardening.

Grow something that people would want to buy.

So I started out with a market stand at a farmer's market.

Now as a Seventh-day Adventist, you may have noted that most farmers markets are on Saturdays.

So this is the big problem with farmers market as a Sabbath keeper.

Fortunately our town, our nearest city, Tulsa, had a Wednesday farmer's market, a midweek market.

Only a fraction of the amount of customers as the Saturday market.

But I started attending there and would, you know, sell a hundred or 2 dollars in 4 hours or so my first year.

But there was 1 couple that were serious market gardeners and they their their primary business was the Saturday market but they had a midweek CSA farm stand and I watched a lot of what they did and pretty much everything that I do growing and marketing wise is just copying what I saw them do.

And as I've matured in my experience and read more books, I realized that there's a lot of other professionals that do what they do.

But I just was copying the stand right next to me.

And eventually, we were probably 1 of the larger vendors at that market before we quit going.

The other couple, I think they were just there for ministry purposes, not spiritual ministry, but to keep the market open.

They were kind of the anchor for that farmers market.

And after my stand was up and running fairly well, and they were probably making so much money, they just stuck with their Saturday market and let me take care of the Wednesday market.

But eventually we decided we didn't need to go to that market either.

Just not enough customers on a midweek to be reliable and there's we can only grow so many vegetables and wanted to do something basically we could have done it but we decided to focus more closer to home.

People mostly like to buy their favorite vegetables, so you need to make sure you bring plenty of what your local customers want.

And you learn that by experience, you learn that by knowing people, by asking people, hey what do you want more of?

What do you not want to see here anymore?

So, but people really like to buy things that they eat at home every day.

Lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes in the Midwestern community.

In the South, you know, you people really want their okra, their melons, their collards, and other things like that.

In other places they might want something else.

So I don't know your own community, but the way you like to eat, the way your neighbors like to eat, this is the kind of things they want at the market.

So make sure that you always have plenty of those.

Everybody always likes strawberries, so strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes, those are pretty, pretty good things to sell.

Now like nobody in my family likes radicchio, we, nobody ever grew up eating fava beans, But when I was at the Tulsa Farmer's Market, we had some Italian customers that just raved and raved about them, bought me out every time that I brought any.

I tried selling them to my customers in Bristow, small-town Oklahoma, and they never seen these things.

They never, they don't want any bitter lettuce.

So, but it's what people grew up with, that's what they want.

The other reason people will shop at a farmers market or join a CSA is you can get Superior quality because it's local it's harvested fresh.

There are certain crops like tomatoes strawberries, sweet corn that the grocery store cannot compete with you.

People will pay double, triple to get stuff that tastes 3 times as good.

And you know you're not going to be able to compete on scale, most likely, with commercial growers in the national produce industry.

They'll undercut you on price on strawberries for sure.

But that doesn't matter, because your strawberries will taste 3 times as good and people will pay 3 times or more as much for them.

Things that are going to bring a premium for the market and those things are things that fresh and local are a real quality advantage.

People at the same time are intrigued by something new and different and are interested to try new and different things.

And so if you want to have more than just lettuce and tomatoes at your farm stand, you can try new things.

And what's new will be different for every community.

In our community, people had never, they, people had no idea what kohlrabi was, and I still get a trickle of customers that don't know what kohlrabi is.

Or Japanese white salad turnips, a variety that Johnny sells called haikarai, really excellent.

They're farmers market standards, but people that have never been to a farmers market might have never eaten them because you can't get them at your local Walmart grocery store, or maybe they didn't grow up eating them.

But they're really great vegetables and if people try them they might learn to like them.

So our where I've been running a CSA in farmers market of farm stand for 10 years now like all the local food shoppers in Bristow really love kohlrabi and Japanese salad turnips when they had never seen them or heard of them 5 years ago.

So you can introduce new things to a market.

People want to buy their staples every week.

Let me say something really quick on this topic.

I was the 1 who introduced the kohlrabi idea.

Luke, I don't think it ever even had kohlrabi before we were married, but I traveled in Europe a fair amount and they love kohlrabi over there.

We were like, where has this vegetable been all of our lives?

Anyway, we actually gave people little samples at first and that would have been a little more difficult to do in the year of COVID, but no 1 has ever tasted 1 of those 2 things without being like, oh, let me buy a bunch.

Also, if we're like super enthusiastic as we're introducing a particular kind of vegetable to someone, most likely they'll try it.

And if it is a quality that it ought to be, they will not be disappointed.

And, you know, I've said many times, oh, my kids just, they'll eat them raw, they love these.

And just, you know, being excited about what you're growing and what you're producing is very useful.

And 1 tip, you know, use the produce that you're selling on a regular basis so that you can give people ideas and tips on how to use it.

And notice the little things about it because they can all become selling points.

I remember we started to grow a particular variety of eggplant, and I couldn't tell you the name right now of it off the top of my head, but I noticed when I would use it when I was peeling it, it didn't turn brown like the other kinds of eggplants, or at least it didn't turn brown very fast.

And I would tell people that, and we would sell out on that, just because I would tell them that little tip.

All right, so as far as marketing goes, it's okay to start small.

If you've got a day job, you don't need to make your living market farming the first year.

I still nurse every, during the off season, a shift every few weeks.

My wife's also a nurse, but we don't make our living nursing anymore, we make our living farming.

But at the beginning, whenever I was investing in the business, starting, I couldn't make a living off of a few hundred dollars a week very easily, but it's okay to start small.

Now the thing about marketing is the big, like there's a sweet spot.

If you're, and I guess we'll get into this a little bit more but there's 2 things you can you can sell you can sell convenience or you can sell experience and There's a sweet spot for experience If you just have a small stand with 3 things on it and 1 person walking by every 10 minutes, it's not much of an experience for the customer.

But if you, what makes, part of what makes the farmer's market experience interesting and exciting is the community feel.

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Marketing

Market Stands and Local Wholesales

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