Like many local farmers, last year was tough for Jesse Lasater.
“Right now, we make hay. We used to have a big sheep-ranch operation, but I ended up selling the livestock last year,” he said.
Then Lasater’s cousin, Ryan Hayes – one half of the folk-music duo Midas Whale – entered NBC’s “The Voice,” a cutthroat music competition with viewers in the millions.
“They went pretty far and did pretty well. Then they were voted off the show,” Lasater said. “He went straight from that show to a crowdfunding campaign to raise $30,000 for an album. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money. I don’t know if he can do it.’
“But he got the $30,000 and even close to $40,000,” Lasater said. “That really showed me the power of crowdfunding. It’s used for albums, music videos, movies – I realized it could be an avenue for agriculture.”
Now, Lasater is launching Harvest Funders, a crowdfunding website designed to help farmers in La Plata County and across the country. Already, Gro-O is making its pitch for scholarship money. The group hopes to raise $7,000 within 65 days.
“The ultimate goal is to be a worldwide platform for individuals involved in agriculture to get funding for their projects,” he said.
The principle behind crowdfunding is simple: Explain your project, business idea or dream to the Internet, break down how much it would cost to achieve and pray that someone out there buys in.
In cases where traditional financing – be it banks, Hollywood or research universities – proves unwilling, crowdfunding has harnessed wide public enthusiasm, tapping into money at the grass-roots level.
In the last month, fans of “Veronica Mars,” a niche television show with a passionate following that was canceled in 2007 (seemingly an eternity ago in TV years), got to see the fruits of their donations. After raising $5.7 million, a “Veronica Mars” movie hit cineplexes in March.
When MIT Media Lab researchers appealed to the Internet, hoping to raise $100,000 as part of the FORM1 project to create an affordable, professional 3-D printer for the masses, 2,000 people chipped in. They raised $3 million.
In 2013 alone, 3 million Internet benefactors pledged $480 million on Kickstarter, just one of many online crowdsourcing sites; almost 20 percent of Kickstarter’s projects ended up getting the cash they requested.
Harvest Funders is aiming to give local farmers the same sort of staggering, middleman-less opportunity: At a time when people have never been more concerned about buying healthful, ethically farmed food, getting the money to produce that food is nearly impossible for small farms across America.
Richard Hillyer of Southwest Ag, an industrial equipment dealership, said across the country and especially in our region, small farms are struggling to stay solvent. He said most local farmers have full-time jobs where they work 40 hours a week, then spend 20 to 30 hours farming after work and on weekends.
“Can someone make a living on it? Ranching has become very difficult because the costs of feed, hay, leasing land and equipment are so much more than the price you can get for your product,” he said.
“What we’re seeing nationwide is that the big farms are getting bigger and bigger. They’re buying thousands of acres, and they’re investing in machines, not people. On that scale they’re profitable,” he said.
“The other thing we’re seeing is small family farms – 4 or 5 acres with specialty produce – finding ways to sell homegrown-type stuff. But they have to grow it, market it and sell all by themselves. It’s a lot of manual labor. It’s very labor intensive. What you get back isn’t high-paying. It’s can be a tough niche. Every year, it gets tougher and tougher.”
Colorado State University’s Katie Abrams, who is an expert on farmers and social media, said she hadn’t heard of farmers trying to use crowdfunding before.
“It has some potential. But as with all new techniques, it requires someone brave to take it on through success and failure,” she said.
“For small American farms, access to markets can be difficult,” Abrams said. A lot of the literature talks about that. They have to be really creative with their marketing. Unfortunately, what we see a lot of time is that farmers want to stick to traditional channels of communication and spend their time farming. They don’t put their energy into marketing.”
Abrams said research already shows that farms are more profitable when farmers embrace social media. Studies conducted on 90 farms in Illinois show that there is a strong, direct link between farmers’ revenue and the number of Facebook “likes” they have.
But Abrams said the world is constantly changing. Whereas research has established that Facebook is valuable to farmers today, “it might not be the tool in five years.”
She said in rural communities, some people “are often just slow to adopt new technologies. It’s been that way for years, no matter what the technology is – whether it’s a new seed or farming technology.
“These things just take time,” she said. “And it’s OK to be hesitant. But at some point, you really have to sit down and make an evaluation, rather than just put up your guard and say, ‘No change is for the good, I know what marketing works.’ Probably, that attitude wasn’t what made you successful in the first place.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
On the Net
www.harvestfunders.com
