News and Blog

Fresh Pastured Chicken Available!

Pick Up Date: Tuesday, June 15 from 7-9PM.

Podere di Melo's delicious pastured chicken will go on sale this coming Tuesday and will be available until supplies run out.  

Price: 3.99/lb

Fresh chicken can be pick up on the farm on June 15th between 7 and 9PM on a first come, first served basis. Chickens picked up after that date will be frozen.

All our chickens are Certified Naturally Grown - raised on organically grown feed and chemical-free pastures. We never use added hormones or antibiotics in our chickens.

 

Podere di Melo duck gets rave review from gourmet website Caviar and Codfish

 

We are thrilled to share with you the wonderful review we received on a local gourmet website called Caviar and Codfish.  They recently sampled one of our ducks and gave us a solid review. The chef that runs the site, Robin Damstra, is one of the few chefs that visits small farms to better understand their methods and products.

Her verdict? 

 

"Podere di Melo's food is above anything I've ever tasted...."

 

Click here for the full review, and be sure to visit their website often (www.caviarandcodfish.com) for many wonderful recipes.  Robin has hundreds of recipes on her site and the majority of them are very easy to reproduce.  

 

Our ducks are pasture raised, fed only organic grain, and given plenty of sunshine.  At $4.99/lb, they are real treat.  We still have some left, so reserve yours today (click here to reserve your duck).

Podere di Melo Farm - Pastured Duck

Spring is just beginning and Podere di Melo is ramping up for the 2009 season. 

We are pleased to announce that we are taking online reservations for pastured, Certified Naturally Grown duck. We are raising only a limited number of these delicious ducks so be sure to reserve yours today. Price for 2009 is $4.99/lb.

To reserve your duck, go to our website (www.poderedimelo.com) and click on the "Purchase Products" menu.  You can reserve your ducks online for $15/duck.  Ducks will be available for on farm pick up on April 22nd after 5PM.  Ducks picked up on the 22nd will be fresh; ducks picked up after that date will be frozen.  Ducks will range from 5-7lbs (bagged and labeled) and your balance will be due upon pickup.

David and Patti Hauser

Podere di Melo Farm

 

This year was a great year for us at Podere di Melo.  We raised over 500 gourmet chickens (along with our new partner farm The Tomenchok Farm), added pigs to our product list, and increased our flock of laying hens to over 100.

 

But with all that, we are making even larger changes for 2009, which includes:

√  A completely redesinged website, including an online store for purchasing many of our meats;

√  We have joined the West Amwell Farmer's Market (located on the grounds of the West Amwell municipal building);

√  The addition of many new products

1. Lamb
2. White Muscovey duck (available end of April, 2009)
3. An Italian, slow growing broiler (the perfect compliment to our French broiler)
4. Significanly more pastured pork (we are increasing our herd four-fold over 2008) 
5. Turkeys
6. Honey
   

We still have some of our French gourmet chickens avaiable for the holidays, so give us a call.  Or, you can purchase your chicken from our online story anytime after December 21st. 

We want to thank you for your patronage in 2008 and we look forward to meeting your natural food needs in 2009.

Happy Holidays

 

The Hauser Family

Podere di Melo Farm

www.poderedimelo.com

609-397-9788

Small farms today are direct marketers and as such are in the business of relationship marketing with each customer that buys products from the farm. The customer is not at the CSA pickup, farmer's market,  or on-farm market because it is easiest or cheapest food source -- they are there because they respect the farmer, want to support the local economy, and feel that their dollars are spent on a worthwhile endeavor. Every chance you get as a farm to interact with your customers should reinforce the connection to the land and make the customer feel like they are doing a good thing by patronizing your business. This is a very difficult task for a busy farmer. I challenge you to take your relationship marketing into the 21st century and start a blog on your farm website.

I'm sure some of you are unclear on the meaning of the term "blog". It is a rather fluid term that is a shortened version of "weblog." In my mind, it signifies a webpage that displays content of varying lengths in chronological order and invites readers to interact in the form of comments. Often, blog postings are categorized or tagged by topic so that users can navigate through related blog entries by the tags, such as "farming challenges" or "farmer's market." Blogs take many different forms from personal, public diaries to political commentary to blogs that are published by businesses themselves. This is the most popular form of content generation and information retrieval on the Internet today and the very website you are looking at right now, Small Farm Central, is a blog-style site. If you have heard of the term "Web 2.0", blogs are big part of the Web 2.0 movement.

Your farm should blog because it is an easy and time-effective way for you to get your story out to customers. Repeat customers come to you because of the relationship that they have with you and a blog is a perfect way for you to start and augment the real-world interaction that you have with the customer. Granted it does take some time, energy, and thought to produce effective blog posts that communicate the farm experience, but that post will easily be read 100s or 1000s of times over the life of your blog. That works out to be an extremely time-efficient way to build a consistent and faithful customer base. Customers that read your blog will be more understanding of blemishes or crop shortages because you can explain the exact cause of the problems. This becomes a story that they can take home with their produce and they will feel more connected to the farm and the food if they know some of the challenges that went into growing it.

The complaint I hear the most is that farmers don't have time to be writers as well as producers. Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo dedicates one afternoon every two weeks to writing six blog articles. He then releases one each Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. There are other techniques of course too: get a trusted intern to write an article each week, find a very enthusiastic and involved customer who will volunteer to write a blog article every once and a while, or just commit to posting a short update once each week. There is no right way to write or schedule your blog, but post on a regular schedule and write with passion because passion is infectious.

At this point, if you are considering a farm blog, start reading a few established farm blogs and get some general advice on how to write blogs. I have discussed some aspects of blogging at Small Farm Central in Farm blogging isn't always literature, but this is and What I learned during an interview with Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo. Blogging will be a topic that I come back to over the next few months because I believe it is the core of any modern farm web marketing strategy.

Some farm blogs to get you started:

• Eat Well Farm Blog : recently discussing problems with the Med Fly and how they are certifying their packing shed as Med Fly-free.
• Life of Farm Blog : this blog is sponsored by the Mahindra tractor company. Perhaps the writer got a free tractor for writing the blog?
• Tiny Farm Blog : wonderful photos and at least a post a day.
• Rancho Gordo Blog : this popular blog receives 300-500 unique visitors a day (which is impressive for a farm website) and even helped the author secure a book deal.

Read about the process of writing a blog and more:

• Blogging Your Way Into a Business
• Business Blog Case Study: Stonyfield Farm
• Blogging for your customers versus blogging for your business
• How to Write Great Blog Content : Great advice from the #1 blogger.

Spend the next few weeks reading farm blogs and exploring some of the resources listed above. Then when you think you know enough about blogging to start, you will probably want to go back to Hosting Options to get your blog online. Not coincidentally, the Small Farm Central software contains all the features you need to get your blog (and farm website) up and running within a few days. I know that not very many farms are taking blogging seriously as a marketing tool, but I have a strong feeling that every serious farm will have a blog in five years.

If this entry is on your front page, you are seeing the blog-style homepage. In the control panel, navigation to Display / Template / Change template settings to change this front page to the description front page. Your choice!