We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Candace Monaghan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Candace below.
Candace, appreciate you joining us today. Innovation comes in all shapes, sizes and across all industries, so we’d love to hear about something you’ve done that you feel was particularly innovative.
My current and most successful innovative career move would be the founding of the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival. I have grown up on our family farm and still live here with my family today. I have a degree in Communication Design, was in a corporate setting for 4 years before becoming a freelance graphic designer for the past 16 years. In the summer of 2015 my father decided to plant an empty field on the farm full of black oil sunflowers. They took to the ground, grew well and drew attention from passerby’s. Once the blooming season ended, we decided to harvest the seeds and bag for birdseed to sell to our local community. The following summer we decided to plant the seeds again. The 2015 growing season had been profitable, so it made sense to try again. At that time the family was operating a dairy that had been in business since 1927. At a monthly meeting between my father and I we were discussing the sunflowers and how everyone had enjoyed them the pervious year. I was being facetious in stating, “Well if people pay to walk through dead corn, maybe they would pay to walk through beautiful sunflowers!” And upon realizing what was just said, my mind went to work. What a great way that would be to help pay down some farm debt and help out the family business. We had a very tight window as the flowers were on track to bloom in 2 weeks. My father wasn’t a huge fan of the idea because of all of the insurance requirements, possible accidents that could happen and so forth, but I moved forward. The quickest way to get the word out was social media so I made an event for the “1st annual Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival” and the word started spreading like wildfire. A local new station came out to run a story along with our local hometown paper. I set a goal for us that day of 300 people, by the end of the day we had 1,600 visitors and a BIG goal to move forward with planning for the following year. Our hearts were full and overwhelmed at the community support we received that day. Our second year we opened for a full weekend and hit an attendance of 8,000 people. We added a hay ride and some farm animals. From that point forward we have adapted so we are open two back to back weekends with 3 field trip days, 2 sunset dinners and evening hours with goat yoga and sunset yoga in between. We have added live music and over 100 hand-made food and craft vendors with visitors reaching 20,000 from 37 states. We are honored to say we have become the Largest Sunflower Festival and Vendor Show on the East Coast.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am a wife and mom to two amazing kids, Ella 16 and Brennen 14. I am an artist and graphic designer by trade and enjoy activities that keep me outdoors. I have lived on our family farm my whole life and find comfort in knowing it’s where I am supposed to stay. I guess it’s safe to say I was “born into the industry” as cliché as it sounds but as most farmers are. The family operated a dairy for 92 year’s. From a young age my siblings and I enjoyed our days playing in hay lofts and jumping into piles of cotton seed. As we aged up, being a helper for morning and evening milking’s became expected along with checking cattle and bottle feeding the calves. While most of my friends had waitressing jobs, I was on the farm milking. The sunflower business started in 2015 by happenstance when a 30 acre field of black oil seeds were planted and enjoyed from the road by the community. The following year the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival was born. We provide visitors a tranquil experience while walking amongst 700,000 sunflowers with 360 degree mountain views. We offer over 100 hand-made crafters and food vendors for visitors to shop with as well. We have multiple educational stations throughout the festival to learn about our family farming history. There are farm animals to pet and a kid area for the younger crowd to play in. Over the years we have built 13 photo booth stations for visitors to stop at and take photos with. We also have an educational phone app that guests can enjoy while visiting with us to learn about sunflowers, our farm and the event. www.bdfsun.com. Once all of our festivities are over and the sunflowers have dried, we harvest the seeds and bag them into 20 pound bags for birdseed. Our acres of sunflowers along with our vendors are what sets us apart to be the Largest Sunflower Festival and Vendor Show on the East Coast. We are honored to hold that title. We are most proud to bring such a wonderful, family friendly event to our community that also helps our 5th generation farm. In 2023 an economic impact study was conducted which provided results of our event having a $1.4 million dollar yearly economic impact on our area. While we are helping our heritage we also take huge amounts of pride in knowing we are truly making a difference in all the lives of our vendors and small businesses around the County as well. At our 2023 festival, our vendors sold an astounding $340,000 dollars worth of products at the event. We are humbled to know we helped in making that income possible for them and their families. We also help our community by offering two scholarships to our high school’s for seniors going into the agriculture field or attending college with an ag related area of study.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Being resilient and having to pivot seem to go hand in hand when it comes to not only running a business but life in general. When constantly relying on the weather, the farming industry knows this all too well. Out of 8 years hosting our event we have had to cancel or close early due to rain for 4 out of those 8 years. When you are in the business of entertaining outside, weather is a major role in what you do and how you operate. We always have to move forward and plant, set up and prepare for all types of weather and have had very few years that we had absolutely perfect scenarios. One year in particular comes to mind. We were having a beautiful day, high attendance and vendors were raking in the sales on their goods as well. Usually, we can predict when the rain will hit and the intensity of the storm based on which mountain range it follows and the direction it is headed. Not this day. It went from a gorgeous day to disaster in literally seconds. A storm came out of nowhere right overtop of us. The skies darkened but this particular one didn’t follow any pattern like every other storm we receive. Before we knew it there was a monsoon of a downpour with intense lightening all around. The storm lasted for what seemed like hours but was less than 10 minutes. When it started visitors were rushing to their cars to get their families and purchased items back to the dry. After the storm had stopped we had a lady that had a broken leg in the parking lot. She simply slipped on the mud that was created from all the rain. (Don’t forget being a working farm we do not have gravel lots everywhere as our parking lot is a corn field) We got her medical attention with an ambulance on the way that had to take her to the hospital. When I was able to make it over to the vendors to access their situation it was like the scene from the Wizard of Oz once the house fell and all the munchkin’s started peeking out to see what happened. So many vendors in disbelief. Multiple tents were ripped and their frames crumpled to pieces. Thousands of dollars worth of products tossed upon the ground soaking wet and covered in mud. I’ve never seen so many people go from happy and upbeat to deflated and defeated in minutes. It was a sad situation. But that’s the thing when dealing with the weather, you have to deal with whatever comes your way. So, we assessed the damages, ended up closing for the rest of that day, the following day and the next evening. We had to let all news outlets know so they could help spread the word of the closure and update all of our social platforms and website. Vendors had time to go through what was lost and reevaluate, make new items if needed, purchase new tents and we all reset and came back at it with a fresh start. We had no way of predicting that was going to happen but now having been through it we know to always prepare for the worst. We have a system in place to notify all workers and vendors should we see anything that needs attention. Vendors must have extra means to hold down their tents and now most bring totes to store their products in or to have close in case a storm pops up so they can put their products into. The situation could have been worse but we learned from it and now have better measures in place for us, our staff, vendors and visitors to help if it happens again.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Our presence on Facebook has grown steady since starting in 2016 to right at 28k. I love to follow the metrics and watch how the likes/follows grow season to season. We can always see a trend when we announce for vendors to register to our show, when tickets go on sale and when we announce dates to our event. There is usually a 2,500 person growth each season in follows. We are lucky that our offering is both beautiful and unique to our area. When sunflowers are flooding your news feed it is easy to click on the photo to see where everyone is going to get those great photo opps. Our product definitely sells its self because of its beauty. We make sure to post at high traffic times and use our tags appropriately to try and reach the audience we want. We are also very engaging with our audience and make sure to “like” and “comment” whenever we see an opportunity.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.BeaverDamSunflowers.com
- Instagram: BeaverDamSunflowers
- Facebook: BeaverDamSunflowers
Image Credits
Hartlight Photography Jenny Marie Photographie Snapkraklepop Photography SkyPics