The Collaborative's lessons learned through SARE grant

In summer 2006, Collaborative for the 21st Century Appalachia in partnership with the South Central Penn State Extension Service Office submitted a SARE Sustainable Community proposal and despite the multiple challenges for a small farm in trying a new venture, nine farmers (six in West Virginia and three in Pennsylvania) expressed an interest not only in learning about value-added but also in trying it on for size because as a part of this grant they could minimize the risk, the financial outlay, and get some solid assistance with marketing.
This SARE initiative provided the opportunity for these farmers to become working partners with SARE and in this way to develop the sweat equity needed to finance their value added processing. The learnings from their efforts then became a model for others to benefit from.

Lessons Learned

• Offering free samples is a most effective marketing technique and so is and providing the customers with recipes.
• Having a recipe from a well-known chef on the package added even more value.
• Consumers love a story. One farmer shared with customers that they were using their great grandmother’s recipe. Another shared the story about how the heritage seeds for their product had been handed down for 7 generations. These stories made people interested and eager to buy.
• Consumers love history—for example, having corn stone-ground at historic (Stonewall Jackson) mill added even more value to the product.

To read more about the Collaborative for the 21st Century Appalachia SARE learnings, please click here