Following a Grow In event a while back a small group of growers kept the conversation going about trying to do something collectively around the Cookstown / Magherafelt area.
At the meeting we had growers who were looking at routes to market and a farm shop, all within a few miles of each - it seemed an obvious thing that we would all do better working together.
We've had quite a few chats over the last while, a fair bit of debate - but always with tea and buns - the essential ingredient in any good collaboration.
Everybody is convinced that working together is the way forward but what does that look like? Are we a co-operative? A Community Supported Agriculture Project? A social enterprise? A Community Interest Company?
After weighing up the pros and cons we decided that we'd just be friendly and work together. We are all operating as sole traders, we already have insurance, do our own books, have bank accounts, work with Environmental Health. Do we need another legal structure? This got me thinking about the Lean Start approach we often talk about at QUB.
The Lean Start Up method is an approach used by tech companies - summed up in the Harvard Business Review...
'it favours experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.'
I'm interested in whether we can adopt these principals for selling our produce.
A minimum viable product is the most basic product we can get to market quickly - in this case it will be a weekly veg box - collected from AJ's Farm Shop.
Our next move will be to get customer feedback - start floating the idea out on social media, building interest, getting feedback, gathering names.
Lean launch means getting to market with as few resources as possible. We are going to start in a small way, keep it simple, test, try, change, adapt as we build relationships with our customers.
It's really tempting to keep adding stuff and making it more and more complex - but sticking to lean principals means we go with our most basic scenario and then quickly respond to what works and what doesn't.
The idea is that staying small and lean allows us to pivot quickly if we need to change.
It's a difficult approach to apply in farming where so much of what we want to do requires expensive infrastucture and we have to work in seasons but it will be interesting to see if this low risk approach works.
Watch this space.