However, along with demanding a high price from clients, this level of service exacts a toll on its owners. By pioneering a high-end niche in agriculture, the Joneses discovered a way to escape from the commodity-based farming that had bankrupted them. To escape the relentless grind, at this point, they must look beyond. Half of the acres that they farm are planted each year in cover crops, but they recognize that not only the soil needs replenishment. "As a small family farm, we had to reinvent what sustainable agriculture means," Lee says. "In the past, it was about preserving the land. But in reality, there has been such an exodus from the American family farm, we have to redefine sustainable agriculture to be about the people as well as the land."
The Culinary Vegetable Institute, in the small town of Milan, near Huron, was born from the Joneses' desire to serve chefs in a less backbreaking way. Construction of the $2 million facility--which features a state-of-the-art professional kitchen in a four-bedroom woodsy lodge--was begun on the inauspicious date of September 15, 2001, four days after the terrorist attacks that grounded U.S. air traffic. For a business that relies on next-day air shipment, it was an especially difficult moment, but at any time, the institute would qualify as an audacious idea. "It's one thing if you do it 30 minutes outside Manhattan," Trotter says. "But to do it where they put it is something else." The Joneses persevered. Last year 487 chefs traveled to Ohio to visit the institute. It is a great marketing tool, enabling customers to visit the fields, experiment with the products, and deepen their relationship with the farm.
The institute also allows the Joneses to earn income that is not the direct result of agricultural toil. To help carry the costs, they rent out the lodge for weddings and other events, including corporate retreats. A dozen companies have used it "as a place to expand creativity," Bob says. When they are food-related corporations, the Joneses can land future orders along with the rental fees. Large companies, including Birds Eye Foods and Ameristar Casinos (NASDAQ:ASCA), have sent teams to the institute.
Now that Bob Sr. has reached what used to be retirement age, the Joneses are working with a consultant to develop a 15-year business plan, which they hope to have in a preliminary draft by early 2007. "There is a real gulf between an entrepreneurial business where you can do anything through harder work and an ongoing sustainable business that is run through good management technique," Bob says. "That is the point where many businesses fail. There was no plan for the future, everyone was working too hard, it was wearing on everyone, and it wasn't sustainable."
For their kind of farming, shortcuts don't work. In a business that requires a long lead time between seeding and harvest, it would be nice to have a more reliable order pattern, for example. "A chef will say, 'I love this, I want 30 packages," says Mike Ineson, the company's sales manager. "We will expect to get that, we seed more, and then if he decides he doesn't want so much, we have to try to find something else to do with it. Nothing is more discouraging for the growers than to get the seed, plant it, water it, and then not have a home for it and dump it into the compost. It becomes a very expensive compost heap." Some years ago, Chef's Garden experimented in stabilizing demand by selling vegetables in reliable quantities to a middleman firm. That ended unhappily. "They would not take care of the product, and they would deliver it after days of storage," Bob says. "They'd buy 15 containers and sell it out of inventory. There is no substitute for cutting it and putting it on a plate." Indeed, when they promote their products, the Joneses refrain from referring to storage. They do not want to dilute the image of their farm as a virtual cutting garden right outside the chef's door.
The Joneses hope to expand their consulting business, Lee says, as a way "to maintain our identity as a small family farm but generate more revenue." He believes there is long-term potential in collaborating with a big company such as Birds Eye. "They have perhaps a limited number of vegetables they are growing," he says. "The idea is getting them to think outside the box in terms of flavors, and then bringing in that third dimension of showing how they can do that affordably. I do a presentation with microbasil. It costs $140 a pound, but two or three pieces enhance the value of the product for pennies." The Joneses also believe that the research they are doing on soil enrichment as a means of flavor enhancement could be applied by other farms. They're looking at anything and everything that will allow them to, as Bob says, "expand the business without taking more blood and sweat from us."
As every farmer knows, that's a lot to ask. If they come up with a business plan that permits the Chef's Garden to keep growing without sapping more of their energy, the Joneses will have created something even more remarkable than a $65 melon.
