Five essential components of a pick-your-own farm
Pick-your-own farming is a production model in which consumers go directly to farms to pick and purchase fruits and vegetables. This very profitable agritourism model has enabled us at Pure Land Farm to produce much more volume than we would be able to move through traditional market gardening avenues of sale, like the farmers market or local restaurants, without significant investments in labor and equipment. The time we save by eliminating the harvest, prep and marketing labor is repurposed to scale up the number of plants we grow, resulting in a fatter top line at no additional expense.
This model is not new; agritourism pioneer Dr. Booker T. Whatley preached about the value of pick-your-own more than 40 years ago. While we too are evangelists for the model, it’s understandably not going to be the best fit for every farm. There are five components of our operation that we’ve identified as key contributors to our success.
- Access to land near a metropolitan or tourist area relative in size to your farm’s scale
There’s no way around it — if you want people to come to your farm, you need to be near the people. A survey of about 350 of our customers in 2022 found that just over half travel 30 miles or fewer to visit us. Most of the remaining respondents travel fewer than 10 miles.
Of course, it’s all relative; if you’re planning a half-acre you-pick farm, you probably don’t need a huge pool of available customers because it won’t take many people to pick clean. But if you’re trying to produce on a large scale, being close to a major population center will dramatically increase your accessibility for potential customers.
- Startup capital for a robust, resilient farming operation
We earn revenue from only two products at Pure Land: produce and admission. It is critical to grow as much as food as we can, because it’s the only way to increase both. The revenue from produce obviously increases with a bigger harvest, but revenue from admission increases commensurately because it takes more people to pick everything.
To grow at scale successfully, you must be able to afford the materials and equipment to do so. Everybody’s context is different, and there are so many different ways to farm; I’m not going to say you must have a tractor or a fancy seeder or six employees — that’s up to you. Our priority is to grow everything by ourselves without additional labor, though. In our context, that requires a tractor, mulch layer and transplanter, along with a few other simple implements.
But those are just the big things; the small things add up, too. An example I use is frost cloth — if there are frequent late frosts in your area that can damage crops, you must have frost cloth ready to go, whether you end up needing it or not. And don’t forget the things you need to create a hospitable destination for visitors, too, or you risk diminishing the quality of the experience for them. Don’t leave the nice people out in the sun because you can’t afford a tent.
- A hospitable climate during your production season
Here in North Texas, we can grow an appealing variety of about a dozen crops that are ready to harvest from mid-May through mid-July, after which the intense heat makes growing things and hosting visitors impossible. When is this harvest period where you are? Can you grow enough variety in that time period to be broadly appealing, and is the weather hospitable for visitors?
It can be tempting to monocrop, especially with those crops that are in high demand for you-pick, like strawberries. But monocropping comes with a lot of risk. Diversity has been key to our appeal and is a valuable safeguard against crop failure.
- The ability or deep desire to learn how to grow high-quality produce
Another data point from the survey referenced earlier is that our customers really appreciate how our produce is of high quality and has been grown organically. Knowing this has made prioritizing the items on our to-do lists quite easy: nothing comes before taking care of the plants. Your plants must be attractive and abundant, with low pest, disease and weed pressure. I wish this were as easy to do as typing that sentence!
Fortunately, we have excellent resources in books, podcasts and periodicals like this one from successful farmers willing to share their knowledge. You can pull very little of the typical grower’s sleight of hand on a pick-your-own farm; there is no culling in the field before the product reaches customers, no sorting out the seconds.
I think of a farm in nearby Austin that sells sweet corn with the first inch cut off, to remove the earworm. Their farmers market customer never even knew it was there, but this would never fly on a pick-your-own. The customer would peek into the silk, see the worm, and stop right there — or pick it without looking, take it home, and complain about the quality later.
- Patience and affection for other people
If you dread talking to customers at the farmers market, you’re probably not going to like running a pick-your-own. But if chatting with the shoppers is your favorite part, this is the model for you!
More than 85 percent of our customers reported that supporting local agriculture and forming a personal relationship with a farmer as their biggest motivation for coming to see us. A huge part of the experience for the customer (and we are selling an experience) is talking to you. Yes, it can be exhausting to be “on” for a couple hundred people a day, but it’s also so fulfilling.
One morning I looked up from the busy checkout to see Dad with two little kids wrapped around his legs — brothers who have been coming every weekend with their parents for the past four years. It’s hard not to smile at that.
Megan Neubauer runs Pure Land Farm near Dallas, Texas. She is the author of Pick-Your-Own Farming: Free Yourself from Farmers Markets and Join the Agritourism Revolution, published by Acres U.S.A. She will be a speaker at this year’s Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference: conference.eco-ag.com.
