Leopold Center - Farmers learn how to grow markets as well as products

Class around the table

Connie Tjelmeland shows the class around her farm.

Connie Tjelmeland (above) explains to a class of ISU
students what she hopes to accomplish in her prairie
business. As a result of the student project, the Tjelmelands
have redesigned labels for their eggs and will use the
prairie marketing plan in the spring.

Mark and Connie Tjelmeland know how to grow a prairie.

They’ve turned 17 acres on their Story County farm near McCallsburg into a thriving prairie with seed from the nearby Doolittle Prairie, one of Iowa’s last remnants of native prairie. Each September the Tjelmelands harvest local eco-type prairie seed, which is preferred over non-native varieties because plants are easier to establish and can better withstand diseases and insect pests.

But the Tjelmelands weren’t as sure about marketing their prairie.

Thanks to a team of business and agriculture students at Iowa State University, the Tjelmelands are now pilot testing the sale of potted prairie plants in two central Iowa locations. Next spring, they hope to launch a major expansion of their prairie products business to meet an emerging niche market.

The Tjelmelands and other central Iowa producers participated in an experimental marketing class taught by associate professor Kay Palan in the ISU College of Business. The three-credit class was supported by a $15,200 grant from the Leopold Center’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative.

Students worked with niche farmers
The class paired student teams with entrepreneurial farmers who had a unique product for a niche market. After meeting with the farmers, the student teams worked on a specific marketing problem, gathered and analyzed information, and presented their proposals to the farmers at the end of the semester.

“This has really been a boost for us,” says Connie Tjelmeland. “Our background is in production and it was just so daunting to think about doing the marketing that we knew we needed for our nursery business. It will be very helpful having this information.”

Randy Dreher, an agricultural business student from Adair, said he learned a lot about the local eco-type niche market, as well as sharpening his interviewing techniques. Dreher and three other students on the team conducted nearly 80 telephone and in-person interviews with nursery businesses, retail store owners, landscaping companies and consumers.

“We found that people are willing to plant local eco-type prairie seed but they don’t really know what it is, so education is really important to develop the market potential,” Dreher said. He found one landscaper who paid $50 to ship specialty grass seed from Portland, when the Tjelmelands could supply it locally.

Students came from several ISU colleges
The class roster included 13 marketing students from the College of Business, three food science students from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and seven students from the College of Agriculture.

The students were assigned to teams, each working with a new farm niche market business. Among the businesses represented were an organic dairy in southwest Iowa, a family-owned apple orchard near Cambridge, a Jasper County winery, an herb farm near Van Horne, a Brooklyn company that creates biocomposites from locally grown kenaf, and the Story County local eco-type prairie growers.

Palan said the idea to use business expertise to help Iowa producers seems like “a natural” for the business college, even though it hadn’t been done before with food and fiber producers.

“When you think about being a land grant university, it seems like this is something we should be about, helping small Iowa farm businesses succeed,” Palan said. “It really is a win-win situation for the students as well as the businesses because our students need the practical experience.”

Students met as a group once early in the semester. Each team met with the producer to develop a formal business proposal that included the scope of the project, steps and a timeline. The proposals were approved by Palan as well as the producer. All projects involved some data-gathering, from telephone surveys to scouring business publications for information about niche markets.

Students give class high marks
Josh Riessen, a senior in marketing and finance from Urbandale, said he learned a lot about marketing and agriculture. He worked with Naturally Iowa to look at the potential market for “natural” dairy products in the Des Moines metropolitan area.

“It was a pretty heavy research project for us,” Riessen said. “I grew up here and had no clue how dairy products get to our supermarkets. Now I have a pretty good understanding of where all this comes from and how it works.”

Gloria Hutchinson, a senior in marketing from Geneseo, Illinois, said she enjoyed using what she had learned.

“So often you sit in class and you wonder how you’ll ever use the information,” she said. “With this class, you know you’re doing something good for someone. It was more than just a report at the end of the semester.”

The Leopold Center grant has been renewed and the experimental course will be offered again in Spring 2005. Palan is now interim associate dean in the College, so marketing professor John Wong will handle course
responsibilities.