The Cornerstones of Direct Marketing with Joel Salatin Part 1 of 3

Welcome back to the Stockman Grass Farmer podcast and today is a special one.

This is our 100th episode and we want to thank all of you who have been listening, sharing,

and learning alongside us.

Reaching 100 episodes is a milestone for the podcast and we're grateful to the entire

grazing community that continues to support and grow with us.

To mark the occasion, we're kicking off a three-part series featuring one of the most

influential voices in regenerative agriculture.

In this episode, part one of three, the cornerstones of direct marketing, Joel dives into

why direct marketing has become such a powerful tool for modern farmers.

Drawing from decades of experience building a thriving farm business, he explains how

moving beyond simple production into processing, marketing, and distribution can create stability,

capture more value, and build stronger connections with customers.

Joel also explores the mindset shifts farmers need to make when stepping into marketing.

From overcoming the fear of rejection, to understanding the difference between marketing

strategy and sales execution.

If you're looking to build a more resilient farm business, this conversation lays the

groundwork.

And because this is our 100th episode, be sure to check out the show notes for a special

episode 100 listener offer you won't want to miss.

Let's jump in!

Why farmers should direct market?

I'm going to zip through this very quickly because I think you all have already drunk

the Kool-Aid and you know why we need to direct market.

But sometimes it's good to just encapsulate it so we know where we are.

And by the way, let me tell you, we are very open to questions.

This is not just lecture style.

We will have some interactive stuff.

I've actually got some new stuff for us to play with, some new ideas, and so there will

be some interactive so please, please don't be reluctant or shy about jumping in.

But one of the main reasons to direct market in my opinion is for overall business stability.

In general, a quarter of the retail dollar comes from each of four components.

They're listed here for your production, processing, marketing, and distribution.

The problem is most farms get all their income from one of these, which one?

Production.

OK, and only one of these is subject to the vagaries of nature that makes every farmer feel

like farming is different than any other business because we have, as Alan Nation used to call,

the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you know, weather, price, pestilence, and disease.

It's what every farmer leans on the side of their pickup truck and whines about every

day, right?

Which one of those four is most subject to those vagaries?

Production.

When the locusts come, they don't eat the tires of the delivery vehicle.

When the drought comes, it doesn't stop the internet access from working, right?

When the rain comes and you get way too much rain, it doesn't, you know, destroy the stainless

steel in the processing.

So for no more reason than to create stability, stable income streams, here's the thing.

The more dollars we load into non-production, OK?

The more dollars we pull away from that, the vagaries of weather and price and pestilence

and disease and those become more stable, more stable income dollars.

That's one huge reason.

As we know, you know, we hear the middleman makes all the money and these processing marketing

distribution, that's the middleman hat, right?

Well, if that's where the money is, I want to be one, OK?

I want to be one.

And so rather than whining about that middleman that makes all the money, why don't we just

join him and enjoy the largest, OK?

So there's a lot of reasons here.

Number two, it's historically normal.

I mean, direct marketing, the idea of actually purchasing from, you know, within a local

commerce, you know, was the backbone of secure food systems for many, many years.

It attracts the best and brightest, all these other things.

As soon as you start talking about messaging and, as Jenny was saying, you know, sound

biting and how do we compress complex ideas into simple little slogans, you know, that

kind of stuff, man, I'm not saying that it doesn't require a lot of whatever genius

and imagination to know where to place the crossfins for the cows.

But it is a different set of, it's a different set of challenge, isn't it?

It's a different set of imagination, creativity, it's a different skill set.

And so I'm really big on trying to attract smarter people into farming.

I don't know how much gentler to say it, but we've actually had rural brain drain for

a long time, right?

You know, as the society has condescended toward rural, toward agriculture.

And basically, you know, if you're an A or B student, you're supposed to go, you know,

become a lawyer and attorney, work in IT, you know, sit in front of a deal, cubicle, and

press numbers into cyberspace for your career.

And that's supposed to be, you know, this wonderful thing.

And if you're a C minus or less student, then, all right, well, then maybe agriculture's

a path for you.

And what I want to bring, I want to see us create cerebral imaginative pathways where

our best and brightest come back to the farm and be affirmed in it and be encouraged

in it.

That's, I think that's a noble goal.

Another reason direct market is that your clientele is portable.

Many of us are working on least farms, barbed farms, shared farms, and our clientele, as

long as you don't move 200 miles away, our clientele is portable.

They can move with us.

So it gives us, it gives us the wiggle room and flexibility to lease places, to create

collaborative things because clientele is portable.

By direct marketing, you get your own built-in support group.

You know, farming is a lonely occupation, right?

You're out there in the field, moving the cows, moving the chickens, running that tractor,

making hay, whatever, farming is a very lonely, lonely thing.

Compared to other vocations, you know, we're at least, even in a small office, you know,

you got the, you got the, yeah, you got people.

You got the little, you know, sometimes a soap opera, right?

Sometimes it's paid in place, but, but, but, but, at least there, there's community.

There's people, there's, you know, there's things, I mean, our daughter works at a very

small office.

She's the agritourism director for a, for a seven county area.

It's a fairly small office.

And it's just amazing how fast, oh, you know, we went down and saw a movie with, you know,

and so it worked.

I mean, I mean, work is becoming now kind of a, a catch-all for everything.

It's, it's becoming life fulfillment.

We'll talk about that more as we go, but anyway, your customers, when they come, and they,

I can remember, you know, our kids growing up and the customers would come and, and, and,

and tweak their cheek, you know, and say, oh, we, our family just depends on your so

much.

We would, we would not be able to be healthy if we didn't get your food.

Thank you for doing this.

You know what that does for a kid, you know, for the farmer, all right, to have that kind

of emotional supports like Evan, you know, it's having a, a, a, for, or a, whatever,

a, a, a, a, a, a, whatever, you got it, whatever it is, all right, but, but you got your

support group, okay, and, and, and, and a, and a vocation that's inherently lonely, direct

marketing is really good, and especially if you're a stopman grass farmer reader, it's

even more lonely because even your farm neighbors think you're crazy, right?

I mean, our farm neighbors still call us typhoid Mary and, um, you know, bio-terrorist, you

know, because we have unvaccinated chickens that run around in the fields, and they're

going to commiserate with red-winged blackbirds and take our diseases, I mean, they got to

be disease because they're not vaccinated, right?

And, and they're going to take that to, you know, their Tyson chicken houses and they're

going to lose their farm, and every child in Bangladesh is going to starve to death because

we let our chickens, you know, commiserate with red-winged blackbirds that didn't vaccinate

them.

I mean, this is, this is the thing.

And so, and so when we're, when we're outside that orthodoxy, um, it's even more lonely.

And so our customers become, people say, you know, who's encouraged us to be our customers?

Our customers are, they're our support group, they're the ones that, you know, and over

the years, we've had, you know, we've had tough years, you stay in it long enough, you

will have a tough year.

We've had people come in and just, you know, stuff, stuff a bill in my pocket say, you

know, I know you've had a tough time, just, just take this and they leave and you open

it up and it's a hundred dollar bill, okay?

I mean, we had a, we had a customer once he came and it was fairly early on there.

And you said, look, you've written a book now, you need to have a higher, higher profile

of success.

This driving this 500 dollar car, it just, you know, it's just no good.

You need, you need a better car.

He said, I'm getting ready to trade mine and I'm either going to give it to you or the

Salvation Army.

And Tracy said, we'll bring it down, we didn't ask him what it was.

And so the next time he came down to pick up chickens, you know, he drove down and he said,

cars out front, you want to take it around and so we went around front and it was a Lincoln

town car.

And we drove it around the block.

We parked it back in the front and Tracy said, went around to Clint, and they was Clint

Miller.

And she said, where do I sign?

And we bought that car from him for a dollar and drove it for two years.

And man, I mean, that thing had a trunk the size of a pickup truck.

I mean, you know, it was a, but anyway, that's emotional support, okay?

That's good.

And then another one of, you know, the thing that I've really come to believe is that

you really don't have a viable business until you generate two salaries in the business,

okay?

That's a kind of a hard saying.

But if you know the cycles of life, you know that as you age, your energy wanes, your

creativity wanes, and you just don't have to get up and go mentally, mentally I'm 20.

But when I get up in the morning, I don't feel 20, you know, if it ain't hurting, it ain't

working.

You know, it's, it's a different thing.

And so, and so, six all really successful, especially legacy businesses don't just have

one person at the helm.

And in farming, I mean, what do you do if you're sick?

What happens if you break a leg?

What happens if, you know, two, two people are a big deal.

So I really believe that if we want a viable farm business, we have to set our sites and

have a vision, a trajectory out there that we're going to get to two salaries as fast as

we can get there.

Because a one salary business is a very vulnerable fragile business, okay?

And marketing, jumping into that, to all that, you know, processing and marketing and

distribution, what that does is that it increases the pie big enough so that there is a place

to assimilate a second person, all right?

That's a big deal.

Now, there are reasons why farmers don't want a market, okay?

It's hard work, you know?

You know, it's, it requires creativity.

It involves people and most of us farmers, we're farmers because we don't like people.

So, so realize over these two days as we do this whole marketing thing, remember, we're

here to talk about marketing.

Some of you sitting here, the idea, and when Sherry gets up here, you'll be blown away.

I mean, Sherry thrives on making a cold call to a chef.

Now I'd rather you pull out my toenails, okay?

I don't like, I like to go places where kind of, where people are already kind of in

it, you know, and want you to come.

I don't like to nose my, whatever nose, into a trough where I'm not really welcome.

So, that's different in temperaments, okay?

Different personalities.

So as we talk about this marketing, the thing I want you to understand is you are here

because you realize that marketing is important for your business.

You might not be the salesperson.

There's a big difference between marketing and sales, okay?

And so marketing is the strategy, sales are the execution, all right?

Sales grow out of a marketing strategy, all right?

And so, and so you don't have to be the one knocking on doors.

For some of you when I talk about knocking on doors, you get cold chills and want to run

out that back door, okay?

I get that, totally get that, all right?

And we are going to talk a lot about sales, but we're mainly focused on marketing as a strategy

and anyone can do that, extroverts, introverts, people that don't like to make cold, you know,

cold calls, whatever it is, sales is not marketing.

So you very well may come from this school, go back home and you're going to find a sales

person.

But from here, hopefully, you will take back a marketing strategy, all right?

So that you can get on the same page with your salesperson or team or whatever, you with

me?

So don't break into a cold chill that you're going to fail this two day, whatever time,

if you don't become a lover of knocking on doors and picking a cold song.

We've all read, you know, Zig Zigler, you know, who made millions selling fuller brushes

door to door.

You know, some of us can't even imagine doing it and cyclopedias and, you know, all this

stuff that used to go on door to door, Zig Zigler was a master, you know, and he loved it.

But most of us are not like that, so it's hard work.

You're, another reason why farmers, another one of our kind of emotional barriers is that

we fear rejection, because we're so emotionally invested in a product.

Unlike a lot of things, products and services, you know, you're part of a team, you're part

of a thing, you know, okay, so we're making, you know, gummy bears or whatever, okay,

yeah, it's not a great big, personally invested field, but for us as farmers, we're loving

those animals, loving those tomatoes, loving that t-bone steak, right?

We're loving that into health production on our place or a place that we've, that we've

been blessed to be a part of.

We wake up every morning and we see the dew on the grass.

We see the sparkling of the sunshine on the dew and the garden spiders in the fall and

the, right, and we're so emotionally invested in this, that the fact that everybody in the

world is not clamoring to our door is emotionally tough, okay, it is, and we have to recognize

that, and that's why sometimes, sometimes it's important to have a collaborator sales

person and us not do the sales because we do get, you know what, my chicken, I, I, I

stayed up with him at night, I kept the rats away, I, you know, I played, you know, Beethoven's

fifth, you know, I, I sat out in a field with a shotgun because the fox was coming for

three days and then finally got the guy, you know, we're so, we're so emotionally invested

in it that it's, it's been a bit of a, that's real, that's real, peer dependency, okay,

we farmers, you know, we, we don't like generally our peers to dislike us, we like to be affirmed

by our peers and, and when you start direct marketing by, by definition, you have to differentiate

yourself, you know, you have to explain, well, here's, here's what mine is and, and, and, and

people start taking um, um, um, um, um, um, Allen Nation used to say, um, if you have an

idea and you go to your neighbor and you present your idea and your neighbor thinks it's a great idea,

don't do it. If you go to your neighbor and you have your idea and neighbor says, that's a stupid

thing I ever heard, that's probably your answer, okay. And finally, the fear of sounding self-promoting,

you know, we farmers were a pretty kind of, um, self-deprecating lot, aren't we, you know, I mean,

have you ever gone to a party and somebody comes up, introduces themselves and says, you know, hi,

I'm, um, you know, I'm, I'm Mitch, you know, Cabinol, whatever. And, and, uh, I'm, I'm just a heart

surgeon. I'm just a heart surgeon. No, no, no, no, I don't say I'm just a heart surgeon. I'm a heart

surgeon, right? We farmers, you know, we can always say, I'm Joel, I'm, I'm just a farmer, I'm just a

farmer, you know, right? It's too bad, too bad. But this, this, this is our mentality, right? Because

because we've been, we've been marginalized, uh, blue-collared, condescending to, right? Through the

culture, right? And, and so, so when we start, Martin, he said, man, I got to bet, you know, well,

in, in our mind, down in our soul, man, I feel like a huckster, right? Uh, we do, you know, uh, self-promoting,

we're just not, the, the farmer's psyche is not set up. It's not conducive to self-promotion.

We, what, we work. We work, we put our head down, we work, right? You, you carry your water,

you move your cows, you pull your weeds and your beans, you, you work, right? And, and, and we love

it. It's not, it's not bad work. We love it. But we're not, our, our vocation, our, the agricultural

career path does not promote selling and we at the best and coming, you know, it doesn't promote

circus theatric, right? Self-promotion. And, and that's, and that's, that's, that's an emotional

hurdle that we have to think about, uh, which, again, is a reason why sometimes a partner is better.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, healing the planet, one bite at a time.

It's on every one of our little bags. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. But that's, that's, that's part of

messaging. It's part of coming out of that hole, uh, that, that we've, that we've kind of been put

in. All right. Um, yeah, most farmers really don't like people. Okay. And then I just put down some

of these, just, just to remind us that there are goals that can get in our way, I think as we,

as we head down this path and, and, and, and beware of these goals. I, I call them anti-goals. They,

they, they, they actually, you know, hurt us from being able to go where we want to go. Uh, one is,

I want to have the highest price product. Um, um, Alan, I used to argue about this a little bit, you

know, and, and, um, I'm not a pure capitalist. Okay. Uh, I'll just say that. I'm not, I love

capitalism, but I'm not a pure capitalist. And if my dad were alive today, he was a economics

business, you know, dude, and, um, and, and, and if he were alive today, our, some of our attention

would be about, he'd always say, well, price it whatever the market will bear. Well, no, I, I,

I want to actually put Tyson's out of business. And, and I'm not going to do that with the highest

price product. So we price it, and we forgot efficiently how to grow it with a margin. It makes

it work so that we can scale it, duplicate it. And, and, and that's just, you know, uh,

so we can heal more land, touch more land, and that sort of thing. All right. Um, I want to be the

bigger. I want to, or the biggest or whatever, you know, that, that gets into it. I want to

franchise. Nothing wrong with franchises. Man, franchise has been very, very successful.

But don't, but don't, don't, don't aspire there out, out the, you know, what we want to do is,

is have a prototype. You know, at our farm, our, our question every time we have an idea,

and we're going to launch something or do something different, our first question is never how big

can it be? It's always how small can it be. Because if it doesn't work small, it won't work big.

There's nothing about getting bigger of a, of a, of a dysfunctional or a malfunctioning prototype.

There's nothing about making it bigger that will make it better. Uh, we talk about that a lot

with, uh, interns and apprentices and things. You know, if, if you think, if you think that, um,

that adding an educational, uh, component to your place is going to solve your inefficiencies,

think again, it's going to compound your inefficiencies. Okay. So, um, I want, uh, I want to do

everything the customer wants. Yeah, you can't do everything in customer wants. You are never

going to please every single person all the time. Okay. And by definition, we're going to talk a

lot about finding our tribe and what is the core? What's the soul of what we're, what we're doing?

And, um, and, and if we, if we think, if, if we're so thin-skinned, that we can never have a

customer complaint, we're not going to be successful marketers. Because, um, no matter what you do,

you're never going to please every single person all the time. It ain't, and you can't create a

product that pleases every single person all the time. Um, I want to make a lot of money. That's

not a, that's not a good one. And I want to sip wine on the beach and they came in islands. That

will get you derailed every time. So, um, let's, let, let, let's jump in now to some of these corner

stones of, of direct marketing. The first one I would say is diversity. And, um, if you don't

remember anything, remember this. It's easier to find 100 people to spend a thousand dollars with

you than a thousand people to spend a hundred dollars with you. But the cost of marketing is customer

acquisition. Every customer costs something to acquire. Okay? And once you have a customer,

especially if it's a loyal customer, they want to buy more. The one-stop shop works. Why? Why does

Walmart work? Where you can get your oil change, get diapers, bananas, and, uh, and TV dinners all

in one place. Okay? Now, we're not going to be a Walmart, but what I am suggesting is that the,

the closer we can come to a one-stop shop, the better off we're going to be. Because if we can take

an existing customer that's a hundred dollars a year, and we can turn them into two hundred dollars

a year with another product or a value-added product or a totally, um, complimentary product.

Because remember, the person that makes the sale owns the customer. The person that makes the sale

owns the customer. So if you collaborate with 10 farmers in your area to present a pretty well-rounded

cornucopia of options to your customer, and you can take that customer that was just buying beef,

and that customer can now buy squash, watermelon, pumpkin pie, and, um, you know, radishes, okay?

The cost, the cost of customer acquisition was handled at the first sale. You know, Alan used to

always say, you never make money on your first sale. Stopman Grass Farmer. We never make money

on the first subscription. We only make money on renewals. Why? Because, because of turnover rate,

and because of the cost of acquiring that first customer. So we're constantly thinking about

diversifying our portfolio, owning that customer. So if all you're doing right now is grass-finished beef,

think about either you producing or collaborating with somebody or bringing somebody into the

program where you can offer chicken, pork, okay? Apples, vinegar, all right? Because the cost of

customer acquisition is that high. Which brings me to the next point is that you can't do it

all, okay? Nobody can do it all. So you're going to start to put together complimentary people.

Now every single one of us has strengths and weaknesses. If you're familiar with the business

program, strengths finders, okay? Strength finders. Some of us grew up with, with, um, you know,

grandma, grandpa, whatever, telling us, you know, you're pretty weak here. You need to, you need to

work on that, okay? Now I'm not talking about character development, like, you know, telling the truth.

But I'm talking about we have different strengths and weakness. Some, some people tend to be more

analytical. Some people tend to be more, you know, engineer type. We have introverts, extroverts,

you know, messes, cleanies, um, organized, disorganized. We've got people that are planners,

and people that are spontaneous. And, and that's all good, all right? And in farming, almost

always, we see people migrating to certain themes. You don't normally see a person who is equally

passionate and good at raising both plants and animals. We tend to gravitate either toward

livestock or toward plants, and in plants, we even gravitate between annuals like gardening

versus perennials like orcharding, okay? So, so it's, there's enough, there's enough to go around

here that it can occupy everybody's ambition and passion and talent. But it's also so diverse

that we can't be experts in all these fields, okay? And the truth is, almost no successful business

works by itself. When we do the business school, Steve and I spend a fair amount of time on this

illness. I'm not going to belabor this point. Just, I want, I want us to understand that sometimes

the weakness of our business is that we simply don't have enough on our platter to offer

to be able to leverage the customer that we have, okay? This is one of the big problems with

exotics. Some of you are old enough to remember back several years ago when imusing ostriches,

that was a big deal. We're all going to get into alpacas and llamas, and then it was bison.

The problem, the problem with all those exotics is that they are, where everybody wants to

try ostrich once, right? But are you going to eat it every Sunday afternoon? No, okay? And so,

this was the problem, bison, you know? Anything that's a bit exotic, the reason it's exotic is because

it's a specialty. It's a, it's a once in a while kind of thing, okay? And so,

so, complimentary people. Now, this also is included in talents, all right? And so, you say, well,

my lens, I'm not even making a living on a farm, how am I going to get a, you know, a salesperson?

All right. That's why I've got commissions written there, okay? Commissions allow you to

tap into somebody else's talent without getting into a wage thing. Again, we spend a lot of time

on this in the business schools. I'm not going to belabor it here. Just realize that of our 20 people,

not a single person is an hourly wage earner. I don't believe in it, okay? You either do salary

with clearly defined objectives or you do salary, you do a hybrid salary plus bonus or you go

completely to piecework or you go subcontractor, okay? But this hourly thing is for the birds.

And so, you know, my favorite story is that beautiful lady sitting in the back,

share her daughter-in-law. See, we handpicked her for Daniel. You know, we had a,

we had a series of criteria here. We sat down and what we were looking for is that said,

what do we really want here? Well, we want a gal that can go square dancing on Friday night,

all gussied up and Saturday morning enjoys gutting chickens. That's what we're looking for. And we

got it. All right. Well, when they got married, Sherry's poking around, you know, well, you know,

what can I do? And I mean, at the time, there were, what, four or five,

salad and women. And now there's another one, you know. And so, you got to kind of poke around

and see where you're going to find a spot at this trough. And we had just started the,

the buying club idea about a year before they got married. It was fledgling. It was totally

prototype, very, very small. And she said, yeah, I think I'd like to take that over. Well,

problem was, you know, we didn't know, we didn't know she could sell. You know, for all we knew,

she just wanted to get, yeah, wanted to just, you know, eat chocolate bond bonds and get paid by

the hour to, you know, knit. And so, and so we said, well, how about we, how about we put you on

commission and to her credit, self confidence? Yeah, yeah, I'm going commission. And so, no guarantee pay,

are you with me? No, nothing. In other words, she hadn't sell done cost anything. And that was,

because we can't take the risk of, of hiring somebody on a prototype, a fledgling deal,

and guarantee some sort of a $10,000, you know, maybe it's going to be a part time deal.

But still, how do you know if it's going to work, you know? And then you got tension. And then,

of course, if she turned out to be a dud, then you got to fire your daughter-in-law, and that

doesn't help the family situation very much. And so, we started down. And within 10 years,

she ran this up to almost a million dollars in annual sales. And she's going to talk to you about

it this afternoon. But what I'm getting at is that was a partnership that allowed us to tap into

somebody else's talent without the risk of a paycheck. So, the only way, the only way that

that it was going to cost us anything was it was going to make sales go way up. That's not a cost,

that's a benefit. So, as long as you know your margins, and as long as you have this cost of

commissions plugged in to your price, you can have as many partners out here as you want. So, we have

several people who sell, and they're all on commission. That, you know, worldwide, sales people

are always on commission pretty much, right? Why? Because that's an easy way to measure performance.

That wraps up episode 100 of the Stockman Grass Farmer podcast, and part one of our three part

series on the cornerstones of direct marketing. In this episode, Joel challenged us to think

beyond production and recognize that true farm resilience often comes from capturing value

in marketing, processing, and distribution, not just growing the product. He also reminds us

that building a successful direct market farm business requires intentional strategy,

finding your customer base, building a diverse product offering, and creating systems that allow

your farm to support multiple incomes and long-term stability. If you enjoyed this conversation,

stay tuned. Part two of this series is coming soon, where Joel continues unpacking the principles

behind successful direct market farms. And again, to celebrate our 100th episode,

make sure to check the show notes for our special episode 100 offer and additional resources.

Thanks for being part of this journey with us. Until next time, keep learning, keep grazing,

and keep building better farms.