Farmers digging Internet sales

Online marketing helps to get word out on produce

— David Dickey keeps busy. He harvests pumpkins from 20 acres at his farm in Tontitown, west of Springdale.

He's also a vegetable and fruit grower who regularly sells produce at the Fayetteville Farmers Market. With farming taking so much of his time, Dickey often lets the promotion and sales end of his business fall by the wayside.

But the launch of Arkansas Market Maker - a wouldbe national Web site set todebut in mid-October - is expected to help small- and medium-size growers market their products with minimal effort.

"Anything to save me time and do some marketing for me,'' said Dickey, a former nutritional manager with Tyson Foods Inc. in Springdale who expects to register with Market Maker next year.

Dickey said this year's bumper crop of tomatoes made offering the surplus online at wholesale prices an appealing idea.

Market Maker is a 6-year-old online tool that is free to producers. It is one of several Internet resources producers have been using to boost sales. And farmers such as Dickey say Market Maker caters to wholesale buyers more than smaller direct retail sales.

Restaurants, processors, and businesses such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have been known to use the online resource that grew from a University of Illinois Extension Service project to help cattlemen nearly a decade ago.

Cattle producers needed access to other markets orthey wouldn't operate at a profit, said Darlene Knipe, who helped develop Market Maker and is a business specialist with the University of Illinois Extension Service in East Moline.

The endeavor then expanded to other commodity producers who had similar needs, she said.

Direct sales to consumers are another possibility on the Web site.

"There's no reason why Market Maker can't be used for local marketing," Knipesaid. "But the advantage of the system is that it's connected to other geographical sources of information."

Network promoters hope it will become a searchable, national food marketing database that allows multistate searches, according to its Web site: national.market maker.uiuc.edu

Twelve active state sites are members of the Food Industry Market Maker. The affiliated sites aren't identical, but all offer access to a common food industry database.

"We expect to add three or four more states over the winter,'' Knipe said. "We know it will grow and hope that all states in the U.S. will get involved with this.''

And while it's free to users, Knipe declined to say how much state coalitions spendto become a part of the network. Typically, she said, academic institutions and other agriculture or food-related organizations support the Web site through direct financing or an in-kind donation.

In Arkansas, the University of Arkansas' Agriculture Division and Walton College Applied Sustainability Center are sponsoring the site. So is the Arkansas Farm Bureau and the state Department of Agriculture.

Ronald L. Rainey, an agricultural economist with UA's Agriculture Division, said the coalition initially paid $50,000 and that a $10,000 annual maintenance fee is required to continue being listed.

Cooperative Extension Service agents are helping spread the word among Arkansas producers.

There are at least three other Web sites to help with farmers with sales and marketing:

ArkansasGrown.org, a state Department of Agriculture sponsored site dating back to 2005.

Localharvest.org, an 11-year-old organic producers site.

LocallyGrown.net, which helps farmers set up local marketing Web sites, among other services.

Cody Hopkins a poultry and egg producer from Marshall who brought the LocallyGrown concept to Conway, said he welcomes Market Maker.

"Any tool that a farmer can use to direct-market his stuff'' is good, Hopkins said.

The Market Maker site seems more useful for a medium-size producer who is looking for a bigger market or a cooperative of farmers that has a joint marketing mission, he said.

And it's in contrast to Locallygrown which tries to bridge the gap between producers and consumers and was started in 2007 by an Athens, Ga.-based producer intent on getting the farmers market experience online.

Hopkins said that while sales from his portal continue to grow in its second year in operation, most of his Internet traffic is generated by wordof-mouth and not so much from random searches.

"If a site doesn't work, people won't use it,'' he said welcoming Market Maker as a different kind of competitor. And "as a small farmer I love to see more ways to market and there's a lot of room for growth.''

Business, Pages 75, 78 on 09/27/2009

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