Do What You Love

Some of us can and sometimes do find work we love in the corporate world. Sometimes the work would not exist except that it has corporate support or subsidy. Often you can do the same or similar work outside a corporate environment. If you have not yet done so, ask yourself how you would spend your productive hours if you did not require pay. How many hours each week would you spend at this activity? A time budget makes more sense than a dollar budget. What would it take for this activity to provide the income you desire when you do require an income? The unincorporated, non money loving world allows you to make such choices and find others you can work with. Even the loner can tailor her business to meet her needs without much or any assistance, if rapid growth is not an object.

I've been amused by the marketing changes I have seen in my lifetime. I remember the milk man bringing dairy products to our home. The egg man brought eggs. The bread man, bread and the garbage man came and hauled off our waste. Then our small town got its first supermarket and soon, only the garbage man came to our home. The others were forced out of business. We saved money by forgoing home delivery service. Today we have a proliferation of convenience stores, often charging inflated prices to save us a trip to the supermarket. Lesson? There are always enough people who will pay for convenience and there is nothing more convenient, profitable and environmentally friendly than home delivery service.

Many of us have dreamed of holding up in a store, five to seven days a week, as our customers keep us hopping or biting our fingernails. Now I see so many disadvantages to storefronts, I would always give them a second thought, unless I had money and life time to throw away. A storefront usually means you are not starting on a shoestring or you will soon wish you weren't. Storefronts can be very capital intensive and you must lure customers to your location, then hope they will come and buy on a regular basis. Home delivery sharply reduces start up costs and is the ultimate in customer convenience. In the beginning you can afford to take a few minutes to chat with customers. In a storefront, the customer comes and goes as she pleases, may not want to chat while other customers are present and may be shy about asking for your time. A customer on their own property is a comfortable and often sociable customer. Home delivery offers regular repeat opportunities for one on one conversation, friendship and sales. Your customers are expecting you, not the other way around.

In a storefront, you hope your advertising will bring new customers. With home delivery, you knock on a door and find out if you have a new and regular customer, in a few minutes. Your delivery vehicle and satisfied customers provide cheap advertising of the highest quality - such that money cannot buy. You determine their regularity by your delivery schedule. In a storefront, your business is split between regular customers and occasional customers. That makes it difficult to plan inventory requirements, week to week. With fresh food, this can be very expensive. I say, consider home delivery to compete successfully with high overhead, corporate convenience and chain marketers. The delivery business lets you start small with your daily transportation, one, two or more sessions per week. You can expand your routes and add to products and services as you choose to grow. You can reinvest profits a storefront probably will not allow you for years. It is the best way I know for the little guy to compete with corporate marketers.

Lessons Learned

I recently tried to create a local food bank and home delivery business combination with a partner. Neither of us got paid and there were no profits during the six week trial. It was my intention to provide marketing for local organic food growers and encourage more local gardeners to grow surplus for market. I relearned an old lesson. A shoestring business needs capital reserves until it reaches a profitable volume of business. It needs subsidy from other revenue sources or it needs to be profitable quickly. I have chosen the last option for my next attempt to jumpstart local food production. I am going to market value added products, beginning as a food processor.

I will start with a heavy duty juice machine and a few dozen canning jars. I will deliver fresh, organic fruit and vegetable juices, door to door. Profits will allow me to purchase more jars and fresh food stock. As the juice business grows, I will buy bulk organic nuts, seeds, grains and build vertical stacking, sprouting cabinets. I will find very palatable juice and meal recipes for the sprouts and add them to my juice line. Now I have a bulk food storage operation for survival purposes that also generates profits. As this business grows, I can add fresh fruit, vegetables and a truck to deliver them to more customers. Profits from this expanding business will let me add partners and we can start planting our own gardens, vineyards and orchards to produce food crops all year. Profits allow land purchases - land allows expanded food production. Vertical integration at the local level. One produces, processes and distributes much or all of her own products.

Gardens can be quickly profitable if we focus on the crops we are buying for juice and sprouts, gradually replacing them with our own. The profitability of my already established and expanding juice business gets a big boost. We can add crops for sprouts, like sunflowers, corn, pumpkin seeds etc. These can also be sold as dry goods, further expanding our market. Vines can produce their second year, as well as many perennial crops. Trees take two or three years for dwarfs, three to five for semi dwarfs and five to seven years for most standards. The idea is to get permanent and perennial crops planted as soon as money and labor allows. Our basic business is indoor operations at start up, except for delivery. We then add outdoor crops to support the indoor businesses. We have built up our marketing, so we can market your goods and others' as well. Surely you will pay us well for our marketing service, which saves you much time and money. You can focus on efficient, conservational production at home.

Starting the Garden

Gardening has traditionally been very inefficient and resource intensive. Square Foot Gardening is a simple and elegant system for hobby or commercial growing, regardless of planting acreage. If we are beginning in virgin soil, it will pay dividends to do preparation work as much as a year in advance of the first beds, tree or vine plantings. No matter what the existing soil type, any soil will benefit by pre treating with water and enzymes, such as Nitron. This will soften subsoil down six feet and more, especially with multiple applications. Sow a deep root cover crop like alfalfa on the softening soil, which can be used for animal feed, sprouts or compost. The deep roots mine subsoil minerals garden crops can't reach and brings them to the surface in the above ground plant. Dead alfalfa roots decay and allow more air, water and enzymes into the soil. Soil and subsoil become a huge sponge and we prevent the loss of valuable runoff to a neighbor's property. It reduces the need to collect and store runoff as well. We will be using no till garden methods but if you are going to till the land even once, it will go far more quickly if the soil has been pre softened, which is not expensive or difficult to do. We would simply do this on all land we are likely to plant next year and the year after. We would continue growing alfalfa or a similar crop on this softened land, until we were ready to make beds and tree wells. This way, the land, whoever owns it, will be ready when we are.

If we are growing organically or planning to, we also need to start composting and worm farming - ranching ahead of time. In composting we now have biological aids that minimize turning and speed the process to give us a specially enriched product in two or three weeks from the start. The biological helpers I know about are called Effective Microorganisms (EM). There are other competitors as well. Compost made with these helpers creates special micro environments around plant roots that make the plants healthier, more vigorous and drought resistant. They have also been shown to boost the immunity of animals who get them mixed with food or in water. Topically applied, these little bugs also promote the healing of wounds on livestock and probably humans. I am devising experiments to see if EM affects the growth and reproduction of earthworms.