Pricing specialty crops: resources and tips By Brett Wolff, Center for Crop Diversification

At the Center for Crop Diversification (CCD), many of the specialty crop producers we talk with are direct marketers. One of their most common questions is “how much should I sell my products for?” For those interested in pursuing larger commercial markets, the question is slightly different: “what kind of price might I expect?” These are more complicated questions than they seem, as market type, geographical location, weather conditions, credence or other attributes (certified organic, heirloom, etc.), customer willingness-to-pay, and several other variables play a role in determining price. There are a few go-to resources that can help a grower get a sense of the typical price for their products.

Center for Crop Diversification price reportsCCD price reports for farmers markets and produce auctions in this region are the single most popular resource we offer. We update and add new reports to the site multiple times per week during the sea-son, and we have archived reports going back to 2004. In an odd year like this one with skewed harvest timelines, users can look back at previous reports to see what prices look like in more typical years. Last year we released a 3-Year Average Report for Kentucky Farm-ers Markets and Produce Auctions.

Quick tips:• Make sure the prices you are looking at are from a geographi-cally and demographically similar market to yours — it’s easy to get drawn in by dollar signs and price higher than your customer base is willing to pay.• Consider more than one report or market when making pricing decisions. Is it early in the season? Late? It is possible that the price

What’s insideWeather outlook .............. 4 CCD resources update..... 5

Coming upJuly 10 - From the Ground Up Farm Tour, 4:45 - 6:45 p.m. EDT, at Elmwood Stock Farm, Georgetown, KY. Organic Association of KY field day. For details and to register, visit https://www.oak-ky.org/field-days.

July 17 - Center for Profit-able Agriculture workshop, Recordkeeping for Success-ful Value-Added Enterprises, Blountville, TN. Basic re-cordkeeping for direct mar-keting, food processing and agritourism enterprises. For details, click here.

July 19 - Agroforestry, Polli-nators and Uninsured Crops Program, Third Thursday Thing, Kentucky State Uni-versity, Frankfort.

July 26 - UK Horticulture Twilight Tour, 6 p.m. EDT until dark. For details, see Page 3.

June 2018Brett Wolff, EditorChristy Cassady, Editor/Designer

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Cooperative Extension Service University of KentuckyDepartment of HorticultureN-318 Agricultural Science CenterLexington KY 40546-0091(859) 257-1477Fax: (859) 257-2859extension.ca.uky.edu

Educational programs of Kentucky Cooperative Extension serve all people regardless of economicor social status and will not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnic origin, national origin, creed,religion, political belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, maritalstatus, genetic information, age, veteran status, or physical or mental disability. University of Kentucky,Kentucky State University, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Kentucky Counties, Cooperating.

you are seeing on the report was too high or too low and you’ll see an adjustment the following week. • Farmers market prices do NOT tell us sales volumes. It’s entirely possible that a reported price for a market is too high or too low. Use the reports as a starting point for your own prices, but pay at-tention to your sales. Selling out by 9 a.m.? Your price may be low or you might want to grow more. Nobody’s buying? You may be priced high, quality may be an issue, or maybe people in your market just don’t want that prod-uct.• Auction prices are fairly variable day to day, so keep that in mind if you are planning to market there. • Use these reports in conversations about price at your market. If you feel that vendors are pricing their products inaccurately, bring some data to the conversation and explain what the price environ-ment looks like across the region.• Auction prices can help estimate “local whole-sale” prices. Though they are different markets, they can help to give an idea of the local price con-ditions for larger volumes of product.

USDA Agriculture Marketing Service resourcesThe USDA-AMS has some great resources for as-sessing prices for regional wholesale markets as well as grocery retail prices. Their system is more complex than the CCD reports, but it is an invalu-able resource for seeing what prices look like out-side of local direct markets. AMS reports will allow you to see prices at retail (grocery) outlets across the country, including organic products. They will also allow you to see prices at large terminal mar-kets in major cities. All the specialty crop resourc-es from AMS are available here. We’d recommend starting with the retail reports and terminal mar-ket reports (under “By Report Type”).

Quick tips:• Experiment with the system. Run a dozen dif-ferent reports with different settings to get a sense of how the system works. • Pay close attention to units and other details (i.e. varieties, organic versus not, and number of stores). Convert everything to the same units and

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make sure the products are similar before comparing. • Export the data. If you are handy with Excel or other data analysis soft-ware, you can quickly summarize and analyze the data from these re-ports. • Compare to previous years. Even if you don’t export to another software

program, you can directly compare prices to the previous year within the AMS website (bottom left hand corner). • Keep it close to home. While it’s useful to take a look at all the terminal market reports across the country, it’s perhaps most useful to consider those closest to your market. For example, in Kentucky you might look at Atlanta, Chicago and St. Louis.

Know your budget & buyersThese resources can help you to get a sense of the going price for some of the products you sell. What they won’t tell you is whether you are profitable when you sell them at that price. To understand that, you’ll need a good grasp on your production and marketing costs. It’s beyond the scope of this article, but a good starting point is the enterprise budgets available from the CCD. We have both small- and large-scale versions of these budgets for 18 different crops. It’s also important to em-phasize that these price reports are just reference points for pricing and product considerations. Use them to prepare before a meeting with a poten-tial buyer or customer. At best, you may be able to negotiate a better price for your product and at worst, you’ll know that you were not unreason-able when you held firm on your asking price.

Was this article helpful? Would you like to see more like this? Let us know on Facebook or by emailing brett.wolff@uky.edu.

Resource links:Center for Crop Diversification Price Reports: http://www.uky.edu/ccd/pricereports CCD Budgets: http://www.uky.edu/ccd/tools/budgets USDA-AMS Specialty Crop Resources: https://www.ams.usda.gov/market-news/fruits-vegeta-bles

The University of Kentucky Horticulture Depart-ment, in cooperation with Kentucky State Uni-versity, will host a twilight tour featuring current research and extension activities at the UK Horti-culture Research Farm at 6 p.m. EDT on Thursday, July 26th. Concurrent tours, which will be repeated two times until dark, will start at the research cen-ter parking lot.

Stops on the vegetable tour will include high tun-nel ground cherry and squash production, Uba Tuba pepper breeding, a bacterial spot resistant bell pepper variety trial, cover crops, tomato and squash production using soil amendments, toma-to breeding for mite resistance, sweet sorghum, and hop production.

Topics covered on the sustainable agriculture tour will include acquired resistance for sustain-able agriculture, controlling cucumber beetles in muskmelons with meso tunnels and ground cover treatments, organic hemp production, trap crops for stink bugs, heirloom corn, moveable high tun-nels, high tunnel tomatoes, and UK’s Sustainable Ag CSA.

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The fruit tour will include matted row strawberry and haskap variety trials, apple bagging and bitter rot in apples, hard cider apple cultivars, spotted wing drosophila in blackberries, grape produc-tion, and Kentucky wine.

The vegetable tours will be wagon tours; the fruit tour is a walking tour.

The Horticulture Research Farm, located at 4320 Emmert Farm Lane, Lexington, 40514, is on the south side of Lexington approximately one block west of the intersection of Man O’ War Boulevard and Nicholasville Road (U.S. 27). The entrance to the farm is off of Man O’ War at the traffic light op-posite the entrance to Lowe’s and Walmart.

If you have questions, please contact Pam Comp-ton at 859-257-2909, or pscomp1@uky.edu.

UK Horticulture twilight tour set for July 26th

The twilight tour at the UK Horticulture Research Farm will offer wagon and walking tours featuring a variety of crops and topics, including moveable high tunnels, hard cider apple cultivars, and hop production.

Photo by Matt Barton, UK Ag Communications

If You GoWhen: Thursday, July 26th, 6 p.m. EDT until darkWhere: 4320 Emmert Farm Lane, LexingtonCost: Free

By Joshua Knight, Senior Extension Associate, Horticulture

After feeling the warmer temperatures of late spring, it should not come as a sur-prise that our summer will be a hot one. The NOAA long-range national outlook shows an elevated probabil-ity for above normal tem-peratures for the Ohio River Valley and a high probabil-ity for above normal temper-atures for the entire south-eastern United States for July, August and September.

Overall precipitation for the next three months is not favoring any tendency (above or below normal rates) for most of the com-monwealth, while eastern Kentucky is currently ex-pected to have a summer season of “above normal” precipitation.

As of mid-June, NOAA’s cli-mate prediction center has issued an El Nino Watch for fall (50%) and winter (65%) 2018-2019 based on current sea surface temperatures inthe equatorial Pacific. The direct influence of the La

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Expect warmer than average summer, more potential for El Nino in fall

Nina/El Nino phenomenon is on the jet stream. In an El Nino win-ter, the jet stream stays at lower latitudes, making for a suppressed Atlantic hurricane season and a drier, milder winter for the Ohio River Valley.

As usual, these are predictions for overall averages of temperature

and precipitation. Actual weather experienced over the summer, fall and winter are likely to be variable,with detailed forecasts of specific weather patterns unlikely to be-come clear until within a week or less of their arrival. However, it doesn’t hurt for those of us trying to keep a variety of plants alive to know what these bigger trends are.

Kentucky growers, have you subscribed to Ken-tucky Pest News (KPN)? Articles contained in the KPN e-newsletter are submitted by UK Entomol-ogy, Plant Pathology and Weed Science Coopera-tive Extension specialists. Topics cover a variety of pests including insects, diseases and weeds. Ar-ticles containing pesticide updates, new extension

publications, and Plant Disease Diagnostic Lab reports are also included. Newsletter articles are posted weekly throughout the year; email notifi-cations of new articles are sent to a subscription distribution list each Wednesday morning. For more information, go to https://kentuckypest-news.wordpress.com. Click here to subscribe.

Are you a grower in Kentucky? Subscribe to Kentucky Pest News

Thanks for reading!If you know someone who would enjoy our newsletter, or you’re not subscribed yet yourself, visit www.uky.edu/ccd/newsletter and click “Subscribe Now.” Or call Brett Wolff at 859-218-4384 , or Christy Cassady at 859-257-1477. Stay up to date with the Center on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CenterforCropDiversifica-tion/

Christy Cassady, Extension Specialist

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Be sure to check out the most recent additions to the CCD’s podcast collection, Apples (Reid’s Orchard, Billy Reid), Christmas Trees (Nieman’s Tree Farm, Tom Nieman), Grapes (StoneBrook Winery, Dennis Walter), Sweet Cherries (Forgie’s Fruit Farm, Bill Forgie, Tennessee) and Low Tunnel Production (Dr. Cathy Rehmeyer).

Meanwhile, the CCD is replacing its Heirloom Vegetables crop profile with two new profiles, one on Heirloom Tomatoes (CCD-CP-132), and one on Heirloom Beans. The latter will be available soon. Recently updated profiles are Blackberries (CCD-CP-4), Greenhouse Tomatoes (CCD-CP-57), and Minor Small Fruit Lacking Commercial Potential in Kentucky (CCD-CP-134).

Variety of podcasts among new CCD resources for June

From The Land Connection Farm Dreams is an annual workshop series to help aspiring farmers discover what it would really take to start your own farm business. From assess-ing your skills and resources, to meeting success-ful farmers in your region, to deciding next steps for pursuing your farm dream, this workshop is the perfect setting for you to find out what it takes to own a successful farm business.

At each event, the host farmer will give a compre-hensive tour of their farm, explaining how they started and grew to their current size. The host will then be joined by two other farmers for a panel discussion where you’ll have the opportuni-ty to explore with them more about their farming journeys. The workshop also includes exercises to help assess your skills and resources, and direc-tion for the next steps toward fulfilling your farm dreams.

Each workshop is from 5:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. and is held on a working farm.

Registration costs $30 and includes a light supper and the Farm Dreams Handbook.

Questions can be sent to info@thelandconnection.org or by calling 217-840-2128.

The Schedule:Four Winds FarmDeborah LeeJuly 9, 5:30-9 p.m. | Quincy, ILBear Creek Farm and RanchDebbie DanielsAugust 6, 5:30-9 p.m. | Palmer, ILSola GratiaTraci BarkleySeptember 10, 5:30-9 p.m. | Urbana, IL

For more information and to register, click here.

Farm Dreams workshop series in IL designed for aspiring farmers

Department of HorticultureN-318 Agricultural Science CenterLexington, KY, 40546-0091