2,000 acre farm | East England | 1100 visitors

Reach­ing out to customers

As a busi­ness, we have want­ed to do Open Farm Sun­day for a few years now but have held back due to the num­ber of oth­er farms in the area that open. In the past, we’ve attend­ed neigh­bour­ing events and helped out so we had a good idea what it was all about. In 2017, we decid­ed to hold our own event.

Plan­ning, prepa­ra­tion and promotion 

We start­ed plan­ning ear­ly in Novem­ber – get­ting a head start def­i­nite­ly pays off; you can’t leave any­thing to the last minute. Peo­ple come expect­ing a lot and you have to deliv­er. Health and Safe­ty was an area of con­cern. I did as much prepa­ra­tion as I could, com­plet­ed my risk assess­ment and picked up some good tips from the OFS webi­na­rs. We even had St Johns Ambu­lance attend­ing on the day but they were only need­ed to apply one plaster! 

We knew from the start that we want­ed to organ­ise a large event so we used Face­book and Twit­ter to spread the word and adver­tised the event in the local press. We also ran a poster com­pe­ti­tion with five local pri­ma­ry schools in advance of our event, which gen­er­at­ed a lot of inter­est. The Open Farm Sun­day web­site was very use­ful as were all the free posters, fly­ers and road­side banners.

Our event

About 1100 vis­i­tors attend­ed on the day, which we were real­ly pleased with. In terms of activ­i­ties, we offered two trac­tor and trail­er rides with a mem­ber of staff talk­ing about the farm, machin­ery dis­plays and the local vin­tage machin­ery mem­bers were on hand as well. We enlist­ed sup­port from a num­ber of com­pa­nies we work with includ­ing Fron­tier Agri­cul­ture and the Co-op which gave vis­i­tors a more in depth under­stand­ing of the busi­ness as a whole. Local farm­ing busi­ness­es also got involved includ­ing Nay­lor Flow­ers who did a flower dis­play and Emmets who edu­cat­ed vis­i­tors about kale production.

Doing it again

We def­i­nite­ly intend to take part again. Open Farm Sun­day is a fan­tas­tic way to bring you in direct con­tact with your cus­tomers. As a busi­ness, there is no doubt that it brought a lot of ben­e­fits. Start­ing your plan­ning ear­ly is the key. As there are oth­er local farms who take part host­ing large events, we will do it on a rota­tion­al basis, which real­ly helps to spread the work load. I think for some farm­ers, it could be the ​‘fear fac­tor’ that is stop­ping them open­ing; expos­ing your­self to the pub­lic can be quite daunt­ing. To them I would say, the expe­ri­ence was extreme­ly reward­ing and very positive.