9 pages., Article # 1RIB4, Via online journal., Food hubs represent a business model through which farmers can collectively market product to access new supply chains and buyers can efficiently access locally sourced foods. Many farmer marketing cooperatives fit within the food hub definition and have existed for decades. Accordingly, much can be learned from them to support food hub business planning efforts. We developed and synthesized case studies of three successful cooperatives in order to match key food hub operational challenges with recommended best management practices. Such information is useful for Extension education efforts supporting the development of economically viable food hub businesses.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 82 Document Number: D10831
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10 pages., via website AgWeb's Farm Journal, In their story, “Plowed Under, The Next American Farm Bust Is Upon Us,” (paywall) the Wall Street Journal reported on the tough times we’re facing in agriculture. They are tough. And, as a corn and soybean farmer, it’s painful to see. But farmers are nothing if not resilient. And we’ll survive this one too.
12 pages, via online journal, This study, underpinned by the Resource-Based View and its association with the Relational View, contributes to the existing cross-disciplinary literature involving economic geography, tourism and marketing by extending the current understanding of the relationship between firms' value co-creation activities and sales performance in the context of rural wine producing firms. Specifically, by investigating how a firm's competitor orientation (possessing and acting upon knowledge of competitors) affects the relationship between firms' capabilities to engage in value co-creation activities and sales performance. This investigation utilises a multi-level qualitative investigation within small-to-medium-sized, New Zealand wine producers engaging in various value co-creation activities (wine hospitality and tourism such as accommodation and restaurants through to wine sales, including at cellar doors). The methods employed involved 40 interviews across 20 businesses; observations of cellar door employees in all 20 firms; and collection of archival data. The findings reveal that by having a high degree of a competitor orientation, the enhanced value co-creation activities can help individual companies improve sales performance and support cluster sustainability, including via repeat tourism. However, results vary among competing businesses based on the product-markets served, where illustrations of potential tensions highlight the need for the management of complementary relationships, within and across clusters (the latter typically being to serve overseas markets). This study consequently offers new unique insights that explain strategies affecting not just an individual firm's performance, but also, the sustainability of other businesses.
12 pages., Article 452, Via online journal., Storytelling is a mode of communication in human interaction and is pervasive in everyday life. Storytelling in marketing is also a managerial application as a marketing strategy. Researchers of consumer psychology and marketing have devoted great efforts to developing theories and conducting empirical studies on this approach. However, in addition to narrative theories, many researchers are mainly concerned about the effect of telling a good brand story and its applications, such as advertising design and presentation. However, for those products that usually lacks branding, such as agricultural products, knowledge remains scarce about the relative impact of storytelling in marketing. Few researchers have explicitly developed a valid tool for measuring the effect of storytelling in marketing. To aid storytelling research in consumer psychology, this article conceptualized a construct of the effectiveness of storytelling in agricultural marketing and developed a measure with further validation. This scale consisted of 13 items with four subscales: narrative processing, affect, brand attitude, and purchase intention. The findings of this study supported a structural model with strong order among the four dimensions and good model fit. A discussion of the results and the theoretical and practical implications for consumer psychology and marketing practice are also addressed.
6 pages., via online journal., Sustainable agriculture is spreading in Japan in response to growing concerns about the environmental burden of the agriculture sector, but less than 1% of the total crop area for each vegetable in Japan is grown sustainably. Environmentally friendly agricultural products are produced by using organic and low-input farming techniques; low-input farming aims to reduce chemical inputs, such as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, by half. Here, we used komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach, Brassica rapa var. perviridis) as a model vegetable to study the environmental impact of low-input farming and ways to promote the purchase of organically and low-input farmed vegetables. We first assessed greenhouse gas emissions resulting from organic, low-input, and conventional farming of komatsuna. We also evaluated the effectiveness of providing consumers with detailed farm management and seasonality information to market organically and low-input farmed vegetables. We estimated marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP) using choice-based conjoint analysis, based on attributes of price, fertilizer use, pesticide use, and region of origin. For seasonality, the questionnaire incorporating these attributes was conducted twice: once assuming purchasing in season, the other out of season. The greenhouse gas emissions of organic farming per area (196.7 kg CO2-eq/10 a/year) and per yield (72.3 kg CO2-eq/t/year) were less than those of low-input (322.6 kg CO2-eq/10 a/year, 120.7 kg CO2-eq/t/year) and conventional (594.0 kg CO2-eq/10 a/year, 220.7 kg CO2-eq/t/year) farming. MWTPs were highest for pesticide-free komatsuna (76.9 yen out of season, 66.2 yen in season), followed by full organic fertilizer (66.0 yen out of season, 63.4 yen in season), half organic fertilizer (35.8 yen out of season, 19.8 yen in season), and half pesticide (29.2 yen out of season, 21.0 yen in season). Consumers showed greater preference for organically and low-input farmed komatsuna out of season than in season. Consumers were more interested in pesticide information than in fertilizer and region of origin information. Our findings suggest that providing detailed cultivation and seasonality information would be a beneficial consumer communication tool to increase the market for sustainable agricultural products.
10 pages., Via online journal., Consumption of local food is a fast-growing trend supported by local food advocates and governments. This trend has also captured the interest of researchers. The present study draws from the foundational principles of the theoretical perspective of helping behaviour with a view to enhancing the understanding of why people buy local food. This article tests a conceptual framework with proposed relationships between helping behaviour constructs and local food-buying behaviour within a Norwegian context. Local food consumers in Troms County are surveyed, and the results indicate that empathic concern and social concern influence their attitude towards, and preference for, local food. Local patriotism influences the preference for local food even if such consumers evaluate it as being of lower quality and less desirable than other food products. This study is among the first to examine local food-buying behaviour through the lens of prosocial helping behaviour theory. The recommendations for local food producers and local food advocates regarding appealing to consumers’ prosocial helping behaviour propose communication strategies emphasizing the difficulties that local food producers face, portraying local food producers as people deserving of help against national competition and imports, and depicting them as being as loyal to the local community as the local food consumers are.
9 pages., Article #:3FEA4, via online journal., Extension professionals across disciplines are involved with farmers' markets, and reports have indicated an increase in the number of farmers' markets across the country. We explored perspectives of farmers' market leaders regarding topics and data of interest and capacity and willingness to collect data related to market promotion. The purpose of our work was to provide Extension educators with information that may guide programming around farmers' markets. We collected data through an online survey of Wisconsin farmers' market leaders in spring 2017. Market leaders were most interested in learning how to encourage word-of-mouth communication between customers and engage in other low-cost strategies, such as having partners help promote a market.
