How To Make Money With Chicken Tractors
/By now you know the value of raising broilers in chicken tractors – the advantages for the life of the bird, for the life of the farmer, and for the life of your soil and farm. That’s all well and good, but this is Farm Marketing Solutions, where we focus on bringing value to your customers. In this blog post, we are going to talk about how raising broiler chickens on pasture benefits your customers, and how you can market those benefits to sell more product.
Visually Appealing Farm Infrastructure
Because we are farmers, our passion is reflected in our production methods. We get our jollies finding better ways to do what we do, making our farms more efficient, and – let’s face it – because we’re a bunch of gear nerds. Of all the tools and techniques we use, few affect our customers’ perception of us the way chicken tractors do. That pasture shelter will help you sell your methods in ways that conventional agriculture cannot fake.
Your goal as a farm marketer is to tell a good story to the right people, and to be able to back it up with proof: Transparency and honesty are the cornerstones of every good farm marketer’s playbook. To best set ourselves apart from the opaque industrial food system, we can highlight the wholesome qualities of our products. For poultry farmers, the difference starts with animals living on grass, and our business performance depends directly on our ability to tell that story.
Know Thy Customer (Study Demographics)
Chicken is the most consumed animal protein on the planet, with over 9 billion chickens eaten every year, accounting for roughly $160 billion in market value (according to the National Chicken Council, 2018). In order to produce those yields, the poultry industry has often committed atrocities in the name of efficiency and scale.
The consumers who insist on pastured poultry are those who have realized the errors of conventional agriculture, and are looking for a healthier and more humane alternative. The more you learn about those customers, the better you will be able to serve them. Pages 18-35 of Pastured Poultry Packet #2 will help you define you ideal customer, so you are better able to target your marketing efforts.
The Failure of Words
Words, like spreadsheets, can say whatever you want them to say. What matters is the reality, or substance, behind those words. Think of a marketing term such as “currency” – without the value which backs such currency, it’s just a worthless piece of paper.
Likewise, images can be misleading. It’s easy to take a chicken out of a barn, put it on grass, and take a photograph of how happy it is. Then you can use the photo to market your poultry as “pasture-raised,” with “access” to the outdoors. “Access” is the dirty A-word used by the bigger industry farms.
The power of pastured poultry can be seen in our ability to zoom out and still look good. By taking pictures of our chicken tractors in context on the entire field, we can show the true value of pastured poultry. From one photograph you can see that the birds are outside with fresh air and sunshine, you can see the fresh salad bar in front of them, and you can see the poop left behind after the tractors have been moved, Put together a side-by-side comparison of a pasture-raised chicken and a barn-raised chicken, and the difference is clear.
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Both pictures are from farms that are raising broiler chickens for meat. On the first farm, the birds spend the majority of their life outside, rotated onto fresh pasture. On the second farm – well, technically they have access to the outside through those small doors, but we can clearly see how many birds are actually using them.
***We will break down the details of these two photos in future blog posts. There’s a lot to unpack if you’re a chicken fanatic.
What To Do Now
The ONE next step you can take if you want to set your chickens apart from the grocery store chicken, if you want to reach the customers who are looking for what you have to offer, if you want to fulfill your mission statement and create a viable farm that serves the community, is to simply take some pretty pictures and share them with others.
Zooming out and showing the bigger picture of what we do gives power and meaning to our words. Without big marketing budgets or a team of copywriters, we are left with the tools available to us. Those tools are honesty, transparency, a passion for the food we produce – and any decent camera. If you want to convey the value you provide by raising chickens on grass, you just have to zoom out. And don’t be afraid to share those pictures!
Do you want to build a Suscovich All-Purpose Chicken Tractor?
Chicken Tractor YouTube Videos
Over 50 videos of people from all over the world using Suscovich Chicken tractors. Do you have a video of your own? Email us a link and you could be added to the playlist.