 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Farm Beginnings™ Profile: Robin Moore Robin Moore
|
|||||
 |
|
Robin Moore |
Robin Moore got involved in flower production because it seemed like it was something a young single person could do with minimal access to land, equipment and facilities. Indeed, the 31-year-old woman raises flowers for direct marketing near the western Minnesota community of Montevideo using an eight horsepower garden tiller, a weed whacker, a greenhouse, a van for transportation and two-thirds
of an acre of borrowed land. And she does it by herself.
After five years in the flower raising business, Moore is realizing there are different varieties of alone. For example, there are the daily work pressures of being a sole proprietor of a business that raises dozens of varieties of flowers.
“This time of year I feel if you cut me air would come out,” she says,
“I have nothing left inside.”
But then there’s another kind of alone, as in no network to turn to for advice and support. Moore feels she can overcome a little labor shortage by getting up earlier in the morning. On the other hand, she knew from the start her business would not be sustainable if she didn’t have a network to turn to for advice and support. That’s why in 2001, a year after she started Easy Blooms, Moore took the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings™ course. The course, now in its eighth year, provides participants a chance to learn firsthand about low-cost, sustainable methods of farming. It also provides, as people like Moore have discovered, a critical support network consisting of established farmers and other beginners.
Farm Beginnings participants take part in a course that teaches goal setting, financial planning, business plan creation, alternative marketing and innovative farming techniques. Established farmers and other professionals present at the seminars, providing a strong foundation of community resources, networks and contacts for those interested in farming. There are also opportunities to connect with established farmers through farm visits and one-on-one mentorships. Moore, a native of Missouri, says the course came at a good time for her, although she had significant experience raising flowers already.
“I was painfully aware of what I didn’t know. My first year I started out with a flood and ended with a drought,” she recalls. Moore made mistakes from the small—trying to transport flowers in a pickup truck—to the large—raising flowers on separate plots of land. “I thought I could just do it anywhere, like it was just some traveling event,” she says of that latter misstep. “I was wrong—it’s not sustainable to have the production all spread out.”
Farm Beginnings connected her with other beginning and established farmers in western Minnesota. It also gave her a good grounding in Holistic Management and business planning. Moore also learned a lot about marketing, something that’s important in a venture like direct sales of a particularly volatile product like cut flowers.
“I had no idea how to approach people out there from a marketing sense,” she says. “Luckily my flowers speak better to strangers than I do.”
Moore didn’t quite see her life taking such a turn when she graduated from MacCalester College in St. Paul, Minn., with a degree in French literature. She had plans to work as a literary translator, but found the field “insanely competitive” and the brass ring not all that attractive: “You were competing to translate legal documents.” And, she found to her dismay, you are doing it inside.
“I lasted about eight months,” she recalls of a job she had as a translator/office administrator. “I would look up at the skylight and just cry because I wanted to be outside.”
She worked for two years as a “flower intern” on a Twin Cities area Community Supported Agriculture farm and liked the experience. Not only was it something she could do on her own with minimal investment, but she saw a need for a local source of organically raised cut flowers. As she will tell any customer that is brave enough to ask, 70 percent of cut flowers sold in this country are imported, mostly from Kenya, Holland and Columbia. Those imported flowers come with many hidden price tags attached: transporting all those pretty things thousands of miles burns a lot of jet fuel and diesel; chemicals that are banned in this country are often used; and the workers put their health at risk.
“People are very aware of chemicals on food and the politics of food, but they are unaware of things that are not food,” she says.
Today, five years after getting started, Moore sells the bulk of her flowers through Easy Bean, a local Community Supported Agriculture vegetable operation. Members of the farm can sign up for an Easy Blooms flower subscription. Moore also has office clients in the region, and sells to local florists. In a given year she will grow 50 to 60 varieties of annuals and perennials: from the common sunflower to the not so well known.
“This year I’m trying something called cardoon,” she says. “I have no idea what it looks like.”
Moore has continued to use Farm Beginnings—taking a follow-up course on business planning offered by the program, for example. She is also constantly tapping into that network of other established and beginning farmers she learned about through the course.
“The best thing Farm Beginnings gave me was a network. In a lot of ways it made me feel a lot less alone.”
—April/May/June 2005 Land Stewardship Letter
Click here for more on Farm Beginnings™. You can also call 507-523-3366 in southeast Minnesota or 320-269-2105 in western Minnesota.
| Quick Links |
| Tel: 651 653-0618 |
©Land Stewardship Project, 2001
back to the top