#288: Depression, Dollars, and the $15,000 Surprise - Part 6: Building Your Farm From Scratch

FREE Master Class: The Farm Marketing Fix Sign Up HERE What does it actually take to turn a struggling farm into a profitable, joy-filled business? In this episode, we hear from Judith, a sheep and lamb farmer who joined the Farm Marketing Mastery program in April and sold out of her lamb entirely by the end of the year. She opens up about the mindset shifts that changed everything: moving from feeling like she was "throwing good time after bad" to waking up at 5am, excited to get to work. She talks about learning to see herself as the CEO of her farm, using the Sunday Start Strong planning method to stay focused and organized, and why she believes the confidence she gained is more valuable than any marketing tactic. Her story also touches on the guilt many farmers — especially women — feel about investing in themselves, the power of being surrounded by a community of like-minded farmers doing the mindset work, and her plan to double her sales while raising prices this year. If you're a farmer on the fence about getting help, questioning whether you're "worthy" enough to invest in your business, or wondering if a profitable farm is even possible — this episode was made for you. Key Takeaways: Why mindset coaching is inseparable from farm marketing success How the CEO mindset transforms the way you manage and grow your farm The role community plays in sustaining motivation and momentum How to scale incrementally while protecting profitability Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE A year ago, Hayden didn't even have a farm name. Now she's filing taxes on a profitable business and planning her exit from corporate. Here are the real numbers: roughly $7,000 in gross sales across subscriptions ($1,000), bulk buckets ($800-$1,000), individual bouquets ($1,000), U-pick events ($1,000), a 60-person corporate bouquet workshop ($800), and dried flowers and wreath workshops ($1,000). Expenses came in around $4,500-$5,000 not counting the $10,000+ she spent from grant money on the greenhouse, electric wheelbarrow, and infrastructure that'll last for years. Profit: about $2,000. Her first year. Most farms don't see profit for five. She's raising prices everywhere. Bulk buckets from $60 to $100. Build-your-own bouquets from $20 to $30-$50. Wreath workshops from $50 to $75+. Bouquet workshop events from roughly $50/person to $125-$175/person. She underpriced almost everything Year 1 and she knows it. The Year 2 goal is $30,000, broken into three seasonal buckets: $10,000 in spring flowers, $10,000 in summer bulk sales, and $10,000 in fall/winter dried flowers and workshops. She's hiring two people — one for harvesting and bouquets, one for manual labor. She's trying farmers markets for May and June only. She's secured drop-off locations in two nearby towns for subscription pickups. And she's already been asked to be the only flower vendor at a 1,000-person Mother's Day market. The biggest shift? She figured out what problem she actually solves. It's not "buy my pretty flowers." It's helping women feel unique, creative, and proud of what they put together — the baby shower that doesn't look like grocery store flowers, the dinner party centerpiece everyone asks about, the DIY wedding that saved thousands but still looked incredible. Once that clicked, her entire marketing strategy made sense. And the biggest news: she's quitting her corporate job by April. She's terrified. She's also never gotten a single grant or scholarship rejected — while getting rejected from dozens of job applications. The universe, as she puts it, keeps telling her she belongs here. This is what building a farm business from scratch actually looks like. No trust fund. No playbook. No one running it for her. Just a woman who decided a year ago that she'd regret it if she didn't try. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.  

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE It's November. The flower field is cut down. And Hayden is sick for the first time all year — her body finally giving out now that the pressure is off. The last two months were a sprint. She partnered with Annie, a fellow local flower farmer and landscaping designer, to teach a bouquet-making workshop for a 60-person corporate healthcare leadership conference. They harvested over 1,200 stems, sourced wholesale flowers, priced out every vase and every stem — and still undercharged. They split $800 each after expenses on a $3,000 contract. Next time? They've already rebooked for May at $125-$175 per person. That's the real lesson: your first time doing anything is tuition. Price it right the second time or you won't want to do it again. She did two more bouquet bar events at local markets and venues, and a final casual Saturday morning U-pick that drew people who'd been following her all season but hadn't made it out yet. The connections keep compounding — one person from her free nature walk back in May led to the Mac Market connection, which led to a holiday market invitation, which led to a shop owner buying dried flowers for retail. One relationship at a time. The biggest wake-up call? People were leaving her events not knowing her name, her farm name, or how to find her again. No labels on bouquets. No brochures at U-picks. Friends brought friends who had no idea where they were. She's ordered labels with QR codes and is rethinking every touchpoint for next year. She got the Floret Workshop scholarship for 2026 — her first formal flower farming training ever. She's pivoting hard toward early spring flowers with the greenhouse her $15,000 grant is funding. She's selling dried wreaths and arrangements through winter to keep cash flowing. And she made the decision this week to not expand the U-pick field next year — and felt immediate relief. The season can't look like this again. She knows that now. But she also knows what works: relationships, events, community, and showing up even when you're exhausted and your wrist is in a brace and you want to quit. Next episode is the full year financial breakdown. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.  

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE This is the episode where it gets real. Not Instagram real. Actually real. Hayden's MRI confirmed a cartilage tear in her wrist. Recovery is months out, surgery is possible, and she can barely make bouquets one-handed. She's been in a depression. Her corporate job is doing layoffs and she doesn't know week to week if she still has one. She wanted to quit. And then she opened an email and found out she'd won a $15,000 grant from Ag West Farm Credit — the one she spent days applying for back in March and never thought she'd get. She was crying when she read it. That grant is going toward a greenhouse, season extension supplies, and, for the first time, hired help. On the sales side, the four-week CSA subscription is done. Pre-selling $1,200 back in spring funded her startup costs and meant she didn't have to market during the busiest harvest weeks. The flowers were already spoken for. But pickup logistics were a mess. Friends texted asking for exceptions. She ended up delivering some bouquets herself. Next year she wants a community drop point and stricter boundaries. The U-pick events were the biggest learning of the summer. Her practice run with 20 friends revealed that people were scared to pick the flowers, cut stems three inches long, and needed way more upfront education than she expected. The paid events went better until a bachelorette party of 10 bought tickets to her intimate sip-and-snip evening. They showed up 15 minutes late from a winery. Lesson learned: group bookings get a private event option with a minimum price. The two biggest fails? She didn't get succession planting done, which meant spending $200 at Wilco on plant starts right before the U-picks so the field didn't look empty. And she hasn't tracked a single harvest, expense hour, or bloom count all season. No system, no clipboard, no data. She knows it'll cost her in planning next year. The biggest strategic shift: she's moving away from summer bouquet sales entirely. Next year she wants to focus on early spring flowers with season extension, run the CSA from March through Mother's Day, and spend summer on higher-profit events instead of sweating through harvests in 90-degree heat while working 12-hour corporate shifts. Life is 50-50. This episode is proof. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE This is the episode where it gets real. Not Instagram real. Actually real. Hayden's MRI confirmed a cartilage tear in her wrist. Recovery is months out, surgery is possible, and she can barely make bouquets one-handed. She's been in a depression. Her corporate job is doing layoffs and she doesn't know week to week if she still has one. She wanted to quit. And then she opened an email and found out she'd won a $15,000 grant from Ag West Farm Credit — the one she spent days applying for back in March and never thought she'd get. She was crying when she read it. That grant is going toward a greenhouse, season extension supplies, and, for the first time, hired help. On the sales side, the four-week CSA subscription is done. Pre-selling $1,200 back in spring funded her startup costs and meant she didn't have to market during the busiest harvest weeks. The flowers were already spoken for. But pickup logistics were a mess. Friends texted asking for exceptions. She ended up delivering some bouquets herself. Next year she wants a community drop point and stricter boundaries. The U-pick events were the biggest learning of the summer. Her practice run with 20 friends revealed that people were scared to pick the flowers, cut stems three inches long, and needed way more upfront education than she expected. The paid events went better until a bachelorette party of 10 bought tickets to her intimate sip-and-snip evening. They showed up 15 minutes late from a winery. Lesson learned: group bookings get a private event option with a minimum price. The two biggest fails? She didn't get succession planting done, which meant spending $200 at Wilco on plant starts right before the U-picks so the field didn't look empty. And she hasn't tracked a single harvest, expense hour, or bloom count all season. No system, no clipboard, no data. She knows it'll cost her in planning next year. The biggest strategic shift: she's moving away from summer bouquet sales entirely. Next year she wants to focus on early spring flowers with season extension, run the CSA from March through Mother's Day, and spend summer on higher-profit events instead of sweating through harvests in 90-degree heat while working 12-hour corporate shifts. Life is 50-50. This episode is proof. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE Hayden's four months into building Big Oak Flower Farm and she's in that weird middle spot — wishing she was selling more while intentionally holding back because she doesn't have enough flowers yet. Sound familiar to anyone starting out? The free queer wildflower walk she organized at Champoeg State Park? Twenty people showed up, almost 100 people and businesses shared it on Instagram, and one attendee turned out to be a tourism marketing director who called her event email "marketing gold." She didn't spend a dime on advertising. She just offered something free that her ideal customers actually wanted, then asked local businesses to share it. Every single one said yes. She won a $900 grant from Wine Country Pride to fund supplies for her U-pick events — snips, vases, signage, all the stuff that adds up way faster than you'd think. And even though she didn't get the money just to learn, the grant application process forced her to budget down to the cost of parking signs and scissors. That kind of planning pays off whether you get funded or not. On the sales side, she's at $1,000 in pre-sold subscriptions, a couple of walk-up bouquet sales, her first bulk "bucket of blooms" order for a baby shower, and a $40 custom bouquet she sold at a party after someone saw the flowers she'd brought as a gift. She's also dropping bouquets at local coffee shops with her business card — something that terrified her a month ago and now feels natural. The real talk this episode: $1,300 for farm insurance as a first-year business (and why you need it before your first event), using Wave for free accounting, and why she's finally turning to AI to help her figure out what to actually say in her marketing emails instead of staring at a blank screen. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE It's the end of April, and things are moving fast — maybe too fast. The rain stopped weeks early, it's been in the 70s, and Hayden's scrambling to get irrigation set up while working 14-hour days at her corporate job. A whole bed of ranunculus? Crispy dead. She forgot about them during her work week. That's the reality nobody posts about. But here's what she did pull off: eight bouquet subscription pre-sales totaling her first $1,000. Every single buyer is someone she knows. Not a stranger in the bunch. And not one of them has seen a photo of what they're actually getting. They bought because they trust her. That's what relationship-based marketing does. She ran a $200 ad in the local Newsburg community newsletter and made $240 back in subscription sales within the first week — plus new email subscribers she can't even track yet. She went from 4 beds to 10 finished 20-foot rows, with plans for 17 total. She applied to two grants, and even though she hasn't heard back, the process forced her to write a three-year business projection, budget out her U-pick events down to the cost of scissors, and think bigger than just this first season. The biggest win? A free queer wildflower walk she's hosting at Champoeg State Park that got shared by over 80 people on Instagram. She asked a dozen local businesses to share it, every one said yes, and now she's getting messages from people she's never met. One connection led to an invitation to vendor at a 1,000-person plant sale. She's also setting boundaries — done working outside by 1 p.m., actually cooking dinner instead of eating mac and cheese for the fifth night in a row, and canceling plans when she needs a recovery day. Because the busy season hasn't even started yet. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE It's been two months since Hayden decided this was happening, and things are getting messy in the best way. The work party? Eight friends showed up at 10 a.m. and worked for hours pulling out buried metal, layers of old landscape fabric, and foot-long weed roots. At the end, they all thanked HER. Turns out people stuck in apartments and suburbs are genuinely excited to get muddy on a farm. She's got 20-foot rows going in, her first seedlings planted, and a grow tent crammed into an 8-by-12 converted shed she can barely fit inside. On the business side — website drama. She built the entire site on Shopify, hated it, and started over on Squarespace. Hear why, and what she learned about choosing the right platform when you're small and seasonal and need to throw up a product listing in 15 minutes, not 2 hours. She launched her email list February 10th and hit 43 subscribers in the first month — half of them strangers she doesn't recognize. She got them without spending a dime, just word of mouth and Instagram. Her welcome email includes a survey, and the responses are already shaping her sales plan: more people want grab-and-go bouquets than subscriptions, and at least one person signed up specifically to support a small, queer-owned farm business. We also get into what's next: a possible Mother's Day peony pop-up, selling bouquets through local coffee shops and wineries, a creative idea about marketing to real estate agents for closing gifts, and why she's skipping farmers markets entirely. You'll hear real-time decision making, plenty of second-guessing, and both of us laughing at the chaos of figuring this out as she goes. This is what it really looks like to build a farm business from nothing. No polish. No playbook. Just figuring it out. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

FREE Guide: The month-by-month roadmap to build your farm business from scratch. Grab it HERE I can look out my kitchen window and see Hayden's flower farm taking shape. She lives in a little cottage right on our family property, and I've had a front-row seat to every breakthrough and every meltdown. Hayden is 32. She moved back to the family farm after years of city life because — as she puts it — "it's so much more fulfilling to wake up and go outside and see things growing than there is at any corporate job, no matter how cushy it is." But the practical side of her kept saying no. She grew up watching how hard farming is. She's got good health insurance. She sits at a desk. Why would she go do that all over again? Because the dream wouldn't leave her alone. Sound familiar? In this episode, you'll hear the story behind the name "Big Oak Flower Farm" — it came from her childhood, when she and her cousins would call each other up and say "meet at the big oak in an hour" or "let's race to the big oak." When that name hit her in the car one day, she knew it was right. You'll hear her scrappy funding strategy: $500 saved from working twice a month on a neighbor's farm, driving her old pickup to get $10 loads of compost from the city waste treatment facility, and doing absolutely everything herself. We dig into three sales models she's weighing — CSA subscriptions for early cash flow, a little farm store for walk-up sales, and you-pick events (she's dreaming of "sunset in the flower field" evenings). And you'll hear me pushing back in real time on her decision to NOT start an email list yet. No formal training. No business degree. No trust fund. Just a woman figuring it out. If she can do it, so can you. Click HERE and Let's Meet! Chat with us to see if The Profitable Farmer can break you out of marketing misery.

Profitable Dahlia Summit: 12+ Expert Speakers Sign Up HERE Can email marketing really work for small farms? Jennifer Guilizia is living proof. Jennifer runs a 20-acre regenerative flower farm in Oregon, specializing in growing and hybridizing dahlias. After losing her lease land and purchasing a new property, she joined Charlotte's Farm Marketing Mastery program (now The Profitable Farmer) and used a deceptively simple strategy to build a thriving local customer base from scratch. In just six farmer's market appearances, Jennifer collected hundreds of local email addresses by offering a bouquet giveaway at her booth. She then used those emails to drive traffic to her new on-farm pop-up stand — sending reminders both the day before and the morning of each sale. The result? Lines at the gate and customers buying three bouquets at a time. When she missed sending one Saturday morning email, the difference in foot traffic was immediate and obvious. Jennifer and Charlotte also discuss pricing confidence (why the highest-priced vendor often sells the most), the mindset shifts that separate struggling farms from profitable ones, and why investing in coaching and personal development directly correlates with income growth. They cover why your email list follows you even when you change locations, lose a lease, or shut down a farmer's market — and why social media followers in distant cities can still become valuable customers. The episode wraps with details on the Profitable Dahlia Summit (March 3–5), a virtual event featuring 12 speakers including Marin Mathis and Julio from The Flower Hat, covering tuber sales, wedding flowers, pricing, and the mindset of turning a backyard dahlia hobby into a real business. Live access is $99; the all-access pass with lifetime replays is $199. FREE Master Class: The Farm Marketing Fix Sign Up HERE Links, Resources & Names Mentioned: Jennifer Guilizia — The Flowering Farmhouse: thefloweringfarmhouse.com | Social media: @thefloweringfarmhouse Backyard Bouquet Podcast — Jennifer's podcast Farm Marketing Mastery / The Profitable Farmer — Charlotte's coaching program Profitable Dahlia Summit — March 3–5, virtual event Marin Mathis — The Farmhouse Flower Farm (speaker on tuber sales, grows 8,000 dahlias/year) Julio — The Flower Hat (speaker on dahlias for weddings and events) Hood River Fruit Loop — scenic loop drive in Hood River, Oregon (mentioned as drive-by traffic source) Pricing: $99 live access / $199 all-access pass with lifetime replays and speaker bonuses