Persimmon Hill Farm
by Keith Richards 
(This article is excerpted from Making It On the Farm: Increasing Sustainability Through Value-Added Processing and Marketing, published in 1996 by Southern SAWG.)

LAMPE, Missouri--Earnie and Martha Bohner created Persimmon Hill Farm with the pick-your-own visitor in mind. Tucked into the Ozark hills less than an hour from Branson, the farm offers three acres of blueberries, one acre of blackberries, a half-acre of raspberries and 120 apple trees for picking fresh fruit. A shaded parking lot, cluster of picnic tables, cleanly mowed rows, and beautiful signs all help welcome customers into the fields.

Beyond the physical amenities, though, the Bohners themselves infuse the farm with their friendliness, making each trip to Persimmon Hill special for all who take the journey. Earnie greets most of the customers personally and encourages them to sample the fruit as they fill their baskets. Whenever possible, he also offers tours of the 2,000 logs where he grows shiitake mushrooms.

Pick-your-own is an important part of the Bohners' marketing strategy, but soon after they started Persimmon Hill Farm, Earnie and Martha found pick-your-own sales weren't enough. They needed to create work and cash flow in the winter, so they decided to add value to their crops by making processed products, creating a year-round operation.

Developing a Product and a Partnership 

"We started with jam, initially," Earnie says. At first, the Bohners had someone else produce the jam for them, but that didn't work out because they couldn't control the quality like they wanted. So about nine years ago, Earnie and Martha started processing the jams themselves in a borrowed restaurant kitchen. They would go in after the restaurant closed and cook all night long.

Seven or eight years ago, when the shiitakes came into production, they decided to add a mushroom sauce to their product line. Wanting to develop the best sauce possible, they put out a search for someone with experience in the nuances of flavor and ingredients to help them. They found Bob Nicol, a five-star chef from nearby Kimberling City. Together they spent a year developing a sauce that met their standards of excellence.

During this time, Doug Holt, with the University of Missouri Food Science Department, was an extremely helpful resource. "He helped make the product safe and made our process meet FDA requirements," Earnie says. "Small producers need people in the system like him or they'll get into problems. We can't afford to do all the research and development on our own."

Since the mushroom sauce is an acidified product, Bob and Earnie attended courses in food production at the University of Arkansas to meet FDA requirements. Someone who's taken the course has to be on hand in the kitchen whenever they produce the sauce. Earnie says there are no such requirements for their fruit products.

The Bohners felt it was important to make Nicol a partner, but wanted to keep the farm wholly in their family, so they formed a separate corporation, Persimmon Hill Farm Gourmet Foods, Inc., to create value-added products. This arrangement works well; the gourmet foods company buys raw fruit and mushrooms from Persimmon Hill Farm, then creates and markets the finished products. 

Bringing the Process Home 

Earnie and Martha have expanded slowly, being cautious not to over-capitalize before production and sales warranted it. Through a little investigation, Earnie discovered that commercial kitchens were sitting empty for days at a time in schools and churches all around them. They were going to use one of these, but eventually decided that for their value-added enterprise to work, they needed to be on the farm and not limited by the hours available at off-farm kitchens.

Three years ago, the Bohners finally built a commercial kitchen at Persimmon Hill Farm equipped with steam kettles, sinks, a stove, a sterilizer, an upstairs office, and storage space. Here, Earnie and his two full-time employees (split between the farm and Gourmet Foods) cook their products to exact specifications, sterilize the jars, measure out the jams and sauces, and label each package.

With Gourmet Foods sales doubling in the past year, they are just about ready to expand again. A larger steamer would allow them to run two kettles at once, and automated filling and labeling equipment would speed the whole process along. Earnie feels they are very close to selling enough to be able to justify buying the equipment. 

Juggling All the Pieces 

It isn't easy for the Bohners to juggle farm work, food processing, an off-farm job, and family. Earnie stays on the run between the fields, home, and the kitchen. Martha earns important income as a writer for a Branson area attraction, Silver Dollar City, when she isn't at the farm. Their two young children, Reid and Savannah, aren't old enough yet to help.

A concern for Earnie is that even though processing and farming mesh nicely from a product standpoint, they require completely different skills and equipment. "All the processing stuff we're doing here doesn't have carry-over into farming," he says. So they've diversified their product line to make use of their investment in both processing equipment and knowledge.

Persimmon Hill Farm Gourmet Foods now produces about 15 different products, including berry jams, raspberry summer sauce, blueberry barbecue sauce, raspberry barbecue sauce, shiitake mushroom sauce, croutakies (salad topping with mushrooms and seasonings), and a cookbook written by Martha.

Earnie and his crew strive to make each new product the absolute best. Their blueberry barbecue sauce recently won first place over more than 70 other entries at the American Royal competition in Kansas City. The shiitake sauce also took home a blue ribbon. "There are lots of companies getting into value-added farm products," Earnie says, "but it doesn't have the soul when you don't do it yourself."

Their latest product is a "thunder muffin" packed with blueberries. Visitors to the area started asking if they served breakfast, so Earnie saw a need and filled it with muffins. The Bohners try to keep them on hand during picking season when farm visitors are at their peak, and also make them for special occasions. Earnie says, "The muffins have been a great addition." 

Marketing With Limited Resources 

Earnie credits the University of Missouri and local sustainable agriculture organizations with helping him find out about production methods and processing. He says the Missouri Alternatives Center and Ron Macher, publisher of Small Farm Today, were a tremendous help. "They looked at a lot of things for us that we didn't go into, but that helped us so we didn't waste time (on unprofitable ventures)," he says. "ATTRA has been a big help, too. They've been real responsive when we've had questions on anything."

When it comes to marketing, though, information has been sparse. "Extension and others do a beautiful job on how to grow, but they don't do a very good job of teaching people how to market and live like regular people," Earnie says. So he experiments with various marketing strategies as their business expands.

Although the Bohners have a small stand on the farm filled with jams, sauces and shiitakes, Persimmon Hill is too far off the main highway to attract many customers after their picking season ends. Most of their value-added products are marketed wholesale to gourmet shops and grocers. They contract with full-time sales representatives in Kansas City, St. Louis, Texas, and on the eastern seaboard to promote their products. Earnie talks to owners of other companies in the field to find representatives who have good reputations. Still, since the hired reps may have 15-20 other lines with hundreds of products, Earnie feels they can't always do the best job for him. He would like to market his own products, but simply doesn't have the time.

During the winter holidays, Persimmon Hill offers several different gift packs for sale through a small mail-order catalogue. "It hasn't been the biggest part of what we're doing," Earnie says, "but it fills a hole at Christmas time. We hope it'll keep growing."

The Bohners used to host an annual field day to share ideas with other growers and make further connections. Recently they've changed the concept to a Blueberry Festival so more people will participate--consumers as well as producers. Also, they hold two shiitake seminars each winter. These are more for publicity and good will than income, since the fee is minimal.

Lately Earnie's been eyeing the travelers who drive to nearby resorts and retreats beyond his gates. With a little market research into what they want, he thinks he can turn them into customers. "Thunder muffins" are his first effort to fill this market niche.

Still, Earnie knows visitors to Persimmon Hill Farm are his best business allies. That's one of the reasons he makes it a priority to spend time with them during the pick-your-own season. "When people come out, I always want to know what they do because they are a resource for us," he says. Customers provide him with information on other markets, and if they leave satisfied, are the best promoters of Persimmon Hill products.