March 2026 Farm Marketing News
Anastasia Plomaritis, Phoebe Plomaritis, and Sarah Highlen in 2016, attending a Meat Matters event put on by Chefs Collaborative at a local food store.
Back in 2015, I had to get written permission from the marketing agency where I worked to be allowed to help a friend with marketing in my free time.
That friend was Phoebe. I had met her during my transition from lifelong vegetarian to omnivore, shopped at her family's farm store every week, and started visiting the farm regularly.
Over the next year, I struggled with deciding what would be next in my career, although I was certain it would not be marketing. But a funny thing happened... I helped Phoebe's family farm triple their sales. So I started thinking maybe I could continue to enjoy marketing, as long as I could work with farms and other food folks... and in 2016 Grapevine was born. 💚
April 4th will be our 10th anniversary in business. I am grateful to everyone who's made this milestone possible, including the amazingly talented team I get to work with every day and the clients who trust us to help them grow. It's an honor to partner with each of you. Thank you!
— Sarah
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Webinar: Are Meta & Google ads right for my farm?
April 9th
12:00 PM Eastern / 9:00 AM Pacific
In our upcoming webinar co-hosted by our friends at GrownBy, we'll answer:
What groundwork do I need to lay for paid advertising to be successful?
What are Meta and Google ads, and how should I use them?
What’s the difference between ads and “boosted posts” on social media?
What is a pixel, and how do I use it to track sales made from an ad?
Write a compelling marketing grant proposal for your farm
Wish your farm had more cash flow to invest in marketing? Grant funding can be an excellent solution. We've asked successful grant writers and for advice on writing strong marketing grant proposals that get funded. Check out their tips.
It’s a great time to book a call
Good news — we've reduced the cost of our consultations so that you can book 1 or 2 calls for just $75 total. As always, that fee is deducted from your first project if you hire us.
We offer separate calls for websites vs. other marketing support, because it ensures we can answer all your questions, talk through strategy for each item, and gather enough information to provide an accurate estimate.
Charging a small fee for our time and expertise enables us to shorten our waitlist and talk to serious farms sooner. Our pricing is also available on our website, so you can get an idea of your project cost before booking a call.
Tools for Understanding Your Bottom Line
SARE’s newest bulletin, Enterprise Budgets for Diversified Farms: Tools for Understanding Your Bottom Line provides guidance on using enterprise budgets, recordkeeping systems and partial budget analysis to evaluate management decisions for diversified farm operations.
Platform Updates
Barn2Door has just added delivery as a service for farms within 90 miles of major metro areas (250,000+ or more). With this new service, drivers will pick up orders directly from your farm and deliver to your customers, complete with real-time map and SMS delivery notifications and confirmation with photos.
Legacy customer accounts on Shopify are being deprecated — you can use these steps to upgrade to new, passwordless customer accounts. Don’t hesitate to reach out to Grapevine if you need assistance!
Shopify has introduced new offline checkouts & payments on Shopify PoS. Continue making in-person sales during outages or when your internet connection is spotty – just enable offline payments in your PoS settings, and turn on offline checkout mode.
Using the Shopify’s free Bundles app? You can now publish fixed bundle products across Google so they appear in search results, Shopping ads, YouTube, and more. Publishing your products across Google can help new customers discover your farm. Already using Shopify with Bundles? You can enable this feature under the bundle detail page in admin. Not using Shopify yet? You can start with a free trial*.
Grants for farms in California, Colorado, Oregon, & Washington
Farmers and ranchers can apply to receive funding to implement climate-smart practices that sequester carbon from Zero Foodprint. Applications are open through April 7th, 2026. Read more about the Restore Grant program.
What We’ve Been Up To
We worked with Partners IN Food and Farming, an Indiana organization focused on empowering local farmers, to design their new website. As part of our work, we organized their content and optimized it for SEO (search engine optimization), offered light editing, and designed a brand new look in a fully custom Squarespace website.
The website includes a dynamic events section, resources for farmers and food systems, a directory of local conferences, a news section, and more. Like all our websites, it’s easy for the PIFF team to maintain in-house, and we’re always available to lend a hand. Check it out at indianafarming.org.
“Thank you so much for getting this to us ahead of schedule — and especially for extending such a generous pro bono discount. We’re truly grateful for your support and belief in our work. It means a lot to have partners who are not only skilled but also values-aligned.”
“We’re really looking forward to working with your team to bring this vision to life. Thank you again for your time, creativity, and generosity.”
“I really like the flow of the website and I feel like it is easier to navigate. I like the freshness of it. This is the updated feel I was looking for!”
— Porchea McGuire
Partners IN Food and Farming
“It was a joy working with Grapevine – they were very communicative and created a website true to our vision. Thank you for your care and intentionality throughout the process!”
— Eavy Barbieux
Partners IN Food and Farming
Congratulations, Brooklyn!
Congrats to our team member, Brooklyn Maloley, for growing into a 🌟Senior🌟 Marketing Consultant role!
What it feels like to work with Brooklyn...
☕💫👩🏻💻🌱🧠💭💡🍓☀️🐎
She is welcoming, warm, detail-oriented, curious, sweet, inquisitive, growth-focused, and has a diligent work ethic.
Brooklyn came to the Grapevine team in 2023 with a clear passion for local food systems, a warm spirit that makes everyone feel welcome in her presence, and a voracious appetite to learn everything about digital marketing. Brooklyn joined the team with a background in farm-to-table hospitality, farm stand management, CSA operations, E-commerce sales, and farm marketing.
Since then, she has been a sponge, learning and developing her expertise in Meta advertising, social media, email marketing, Google Business listings, website strategy, and SEO.
Brooklyn has a can-do attitude and incredible attention to detail that have helped her guide many impactful marketing projects for our clients, including Whitestone Mountain Orchard and Indiana Grown for Schools.
Join us in congratulating Brooklyn for achieving this milestone in her career!
*Link marked with an asterisk is a referral link. When you click on it and make a purchase, Grapevine receives a small commission at no cost to you.
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