Here we go! My name is Taylor Mendell, and this is the first of hopefully a good chunk of posts about our farm's (Footprint Farm) 2022 year-end review and 2023 planning. (If you're new here, please check out this post about Hippo Camp, what it is and why we do it on our farm.) I plan to walk you through this process using our farm as the example in the hopes that you are able to use the same (or similar) process to evaluate your most recent season and use that evaluation to make informed decisions for where to take your businesses in the year to come.

Hippo Camp Step 1: A quick refresher

This process starts the same way each season, with a brain dump of all the best and worst parts of our year. Usually Jake (my husband and co-owner) and I sit down at the computer for this task, but this season we still have three crew members on staff so we took advantage of their wisdom and did a collective session. If you have a crew around, I highly recommend pooling your brains since you all have unique experiences and memories and will create a much richer list and discussion. This portion of Hippo Camp might be the most important step of them all because it informs each subsequent step. Therefore, I recommend blocking out 45-60 minutes of uninterrupted time, getting your supplies ready ahead of time, and scheduling it ahead of time so that everyone has some time to gather their thoughts.

The premise of this step is simple: make a list of all of the Achievements and Disappointments that you can think of from the preceding season. You can make this list on a computer, a white board, with sticky notes, on a big sheet of craft paper, or anywhere that is large enough for all involved parties to see it at the same time. I like to start by sharing our lists from previous seasons because it reminds us what we've achieved since seasons past, and/or gives us a kick in the pants if the same disappointment is still on the list after five years of not addressing it. Then we shout out achievements and disappointments/frustrations and capture them on paper until we either can't think of any more or we get off track to the point that it's time to call it quits. There are only a few ground rules and they are:
1. This is not a time for judgement of yourself or others. Disappointments are not failures, but are instead an opportunity to identify bummers/frustrations/hiccups in the hopes that they will be solved or lessened in the future.
2. Each item should be specific ie "I had a hard time finding empty space to put tomatoes on the tomato shelf" is better than "Tomato packing was stressful". If you can't narrow down your frustration, try asking "why" 2-3 times until you drill down to specifics.
3. This is time to compile a list, not to come up with solutions. If someone has a great idea for a solution, recommend that they jot down a few notes on a separate piece of paper. Solutions will come in a later step, but solution based discussions tend to distract from the task of compiling this list.
4. You will probably have a longer list of Disappointments than Achievements. That's ok. If it's bumming you out, look at last year's Disappointments list and see if you solved any of those items. If so, give yourself a pat on the back and add it to the list.
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Achievements and Disappointments at Footprint Farm, 2022 season

Our own lists were much longer than in any year past, I think because we had more voices present. We sat in our greenhouse and I wrote our list on a large piece of craft paper taped to a piece of rigid insulation (it doesn't have to be fancy!). I will add a photo of the list, and some zoomed in photos so that you can see the whole list, but I will call a few out in particular because I have a feeling they will come up in future posts this Winter.

For me, the biggest achievements this year were in working towards some longer term goals around stress reduction. First, we built a new propagation house just steps away from our home. There were a number of achievements on the list that would not have been possible without the new space, and I'm super proud that we went for it because we didn't neeeeeeed a new prop house (we had a little one out in a far field), but our old one was a constant source of stress that was eliminated with this new construction. Also notable were our stellar crew, improved fertility in one of our leanest blocks, staff PTO and SIMPLE IRA plans, using GrownBy for CSA management, and various benefits related to switching over from remay to proteknet for insect exclusion.

The disappointments list, as expected, was quite extensive. It ranged from general annoyances of dead truck batteries or broken bikes to more serious questions of burnout during persistent crew absences (covid sucks). There were a few crop-specific disappointments (Colorado Potato Beetles ate our entire eggplant crop), but for the most part our frustrations revolved around systems (our Wednesday wholesale days have been way too hectic for a few years running), some infrastructure improvements (we have very little storage), and staffing questions (we tried a new staffing schedule this year that didn't end up working for us). None of the disappointments were a surprise to me, I think because we've been doing this for a number of years and we encourage our crew to talk about what's frustrating them. Some of those frustrations we can fix during the season, and (I think, or I hope) it's comforting to know that this bigger process will capture and address ongoing frustrations before they affect us for another year. Unfortunately there are some issues that have popped up in years past, and remain on the list. These are problems that either weren't annoying enough to address, or that we tried to but didn't quite hit the mark. The latter are the problems that are most interesting to me, and are the ones that we focus our efforts on going forward. For this year those issues were around a general cluttered feeling in our tool storage and on-farm CSA pickup area, general team burnout, hectic wholesale days, and cherry tomato trellising and harvest. You can see the whole list in the attached photo, but my bet is that those are the areas of focus that you will be hearing more about as we move through our Hippo Camp process. Please feel free to add your own biggest achievements and disappointments in the comments below!
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Most people start farms because they love farming, not because they love running a business. Fortunately I enjoy running a business, and Jake loves chatting with customers. Unfortunately neither of us had any particular skill in gaining new customers.

In the beginning we courted restaurants then had frustrating relationships with their chefs, we had a dismal CSA retention rate (just over 20% from year 1 to 2, and that's counting Jake's parents!), and a "good" day at farmers market grossed about $200. Going into our fourth year I put most of my winter planning efforts into marketing and am so relieved to say that those original numbers have changed quite a bit. This year we opened our CSA to returning members on January 1 and sold out of our 100 member Spring share by January 2! We regularly have a 80% - 90% overall CSA retention rate, our farmers market stand grosses an average of $2,000 per week, and our wholesale customers are consistent, dedicated, and a joy to work with. These numbers are more than I could have hoped for when we started out, and I have a couple of key resources to thank for it.

Last winter I started writing about each step of Hippo Camp (our annual business review process), then lost steam as the pandemic hit Vermont. I'm picking up a year later with Step 7: Crop Plan, but rather than do a deep dive into crop planning (because there are so many great resources out there already), I'm going to give an overview of WHY the plan flows from review, to goals, to budget, to marketing plan, to crop plan and beyond. In case you are following along and creating a plan for your own business, I'll pop in a few resources (including links to the previous steps) and personal anecdotes along the way.

Hey everyone,

First I want to thank each of you for the support that you've shown me this year, both in this project and in life in general. It has meant a whole lot. I want to acknowledge that support, and fill you in on why I've been quieter lately, and how I'm feeling about moving forward.

This year I've had a hard time imagining how Habit Farming fit into my 2020 reality. I had a million ideas for what to write about/share, and yet none of it felt important enough to put into the world. I felt, instead, like I needed to spend the summer focused on keeping our business up and running, and keeping myself healthy, both physically and mentally. I also felt like this wasn't the summer to put my own voice into the world, opting instead to follow, listen, and support other voices in the farming community, specifically BIPOC and LGBTQ farming voices. In practice that meant tuning into podcasts and live Q and A's, learning about other farming models in our state, and donating 25% of each month of my Patreon income to a BIPOC farming/farm related business or individual. I will admit that I felt I should have been spending more time and money on these efforts, it just wasn't in the cards in a season where I was pregnant and catching up with/running a business that effectively doubled in size from March to May. That said, my hope is that maintaining that level of attention and support over time, rather than giving it one big shout out and donation while the topic is hot, will have a more lasting impact on the future of this conversation of equity, reparations, and the future of agriculture.

As I plan to continue to support those efforts, I also plan to bring Habit Farming back online. This effort may be rocky at first, as I am the proud new mother of a 5-week old baby, and as I am still unsure about including my voice in what feels like an important time to listen to and learn from other farmers. I'm hoping you all will continue to help guide this process, and keep me on track with what's helpful, important, and valuable to your farming careers. Please also let me know if I get off track, post or talk about something in an inappropriate or naïve way, or misrepresent people, places or facts in these posts.

Thank you so much and let's get back into it.

You know that feeling when you have a plan, and then something distracts you and all of a sudden it's six months later before you realize that you completely fell off course? That's sort of how this summer has felt.

It's been a minute since I've posted here, and I apologize for it. Now that we're here, how are you? How's your farm? Your family? Doing well, I hope. We're doing alright, but yeesh this is hard. I've been swinging back and forth between feeling terrified for our business's future to awed and humbled by the outpouring of support for local agriculture. Mostly I've been unsure and overwhelmed, but me feeling shitty isn't what I wanted to talk about today.

Most people who start farms do so because they enjoy growing food, working outside, or creating with their hands. Most aren't in it to sell stuff. The problem with that is that we need to sell stuff in order to create a business rather than a large, exhausting hobby. It takes a lot of bunches of kale to pay a mortgage, people!

Making a marketing plan to help sell those kale bunches can be an even harder ask on a farmer. It makes sense to build a budget and crop plan, but a marketing plan? When I read "Marketing Plan" it evokes thoughts of designing brochures, sending weekly emails that will get passed over or deleted, and giving away free things to convince people to sign up for my CSA. I've tried those things and they haven't worked for me, maybe because I did them halfheartedly and ineffectively. Or maybe because I was sending them to the wrong people, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. Instead of telling you how to create an effective email marketing plan, today we're going to do an exercise like we did with our "Ideal Farm". In this step we're going to dream up our "Ideal Customer". Then we're going to sell them kale.

It's all fun and games until numbers get involved. So far we've dreamt up a gorgeous life for ourselves and we've figured out how much that gorgeous life is going to cost us. We have also thought up what our ideal farm looks like and why, and all those warm and fuzzies should be floating around inside all of us, waiting to motivate us to make it happen. Before we get going here, I want you to hold onto that feeling. This step is not about looking longingly at those goals as we progressively squash them to pieces under the weight of seed costs, limited markets, and employee wages. Instead this step is about fighting for our dream life and thinking creatively about our businesses until they mold themselves into and around our hopes for the future. Let's try to take that conventional doom and gloom feeling around the term "budgeting", and morph it into a tool like any other. It's not here to bite you, your budget is here to help you. I promise.

I started writing about Hippo Camp as a way to share our annual business review. As I've talked with farmers who are following along with Hippo Camp I've realized that for many people an annual review is a brand new exercise. (So exciting!) This process has been an essential piece of Jake's and my business, and acts as an annual check-in to see where we're at. However, that implies that we're checking in based on something that was previously defined. I feel I've done some of you a disservice in that I haven't shared more about the role of Hippo Camp in relation to our bigger goals, so let's get to that today.

This step is super simple, and super fun. Or should be anyway. In this step we're going to make a wish list for your coming season. You're going to write down every infrastructure, equipment, and tool investment that will help you address your Disappointments, and help you reach your Goals.