We recently connected with Jeremy and Kim Haffey and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jeremy and Kim thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

We are busy parents to three kids running a family business. Our goal in starting our business was to be able to spend more time with our children. However, at times it can be difficult to separate family time from work time. It can be difficult to not always think about your constant to-do list or responding to customers. Trying to find balance between work time and family time is always the difficult part and one we are always trying to maintain..

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Our business story is sort of like a rom-com movie. City girl meets the farmer guy, they fall in love, get married and the farmer guy moves to be with the city girl. After ten years of semi-city living and 2 children, they move back to be closer to the farm.

After farming both flowers and produce most of his life with his family, Jeremy decided to start farming garlic to add extra income for our family when we were expecting our third child. Those simple garlic fields were the beginning of Haffey Family Farm in 2016. By 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic, Haffey Family Farm grew from one small garlic field to over 5 acres of produce. As a family we planted and harvested together. We started local Pittsburgh area farmer’s markets and received overwhelming support from the community.

Through our farmer’s markets, we learned that there was a huge need for locally grown, affordable and kid-friendly produce for those closer to the cities who did not have the space to grow their own food. Along with that came the need to educate others on how to use their produce and with the rising costs in groceries stores, how to preserve it for winter. For this reason we decided to start our Community Supported Agriculture Program. Through this program, we could grow our relationship within the communities, share our fresh produce, recipes and tips for preservation and offer the same opportunities to city kids that our children were able to enjoy – that of being able to enjoy homegrown, fresh and healthy produce.

Jeremy had farming expertise while Kim had a background in business and marketing. Together we worked together to grow and promote our business. So the ending to the rom-com movie, in case you’re curious: the city girl who fell in love with the farmer becomes the farmer too and we work together growing vegetables.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Our side hustle began with 600 garlic cloves. At the time, Jeremy was working two jobs.  Kim, was a stay at home mom to 2 kids and expecting our third child. With the new addition coming soon, Jeremy wanted to add extra income for our family. This was a huge investment for us. We used the rest of our very little extra income to purchase the garlic so we could plant it.

Jeremy planted all 600 garlic cloves on rented land by hand by himself, often times after already working a full day. At harvest time, he harvested all the garlic himself. He then would sell the garlic at farmer’s markets. Eventually, Jeremy quit his two jobs and started farming full time. He then added more crops including sweet corn, watermelon, tomatoes and more to sell at farmer’s markets. By 2021, the farm became a family business and we all started working together.

Up until 2022, we rented all equipment for farming including tractors, rototillers, and  plows.However, in 2022, we reached a vital milestone! We invested in a tractor! Haffey Family Farm had our own John Deere tractor and our entire family felt like we earned a million dollars! This year, we were also able to grow our equipment list and have purchased a mechanical transplanter allowing us to expand our crops and acreage to meet the growing needs of our customers.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Kim has an associate’s degree in business administration/marketing and had experience with marketing. However, when we established Haffey Family Farm, the marketing atmosphere was completely different as social media was now the main way to market your business. Marketing a family produce farm on social media was few and far between. Up until this point, I had only used social media for personal use.I hadn’t used it for a business.

However, I knew this was important to engage younger customers and to educate families on the importance of locally grown, fresh produce and to promote our Community Supported Agriculture program. This meant I had to educate myself. I spent a lot of time scrolling through Instagram reels,stories and posts. I followed as many local businesses in the area from restaurants, farm organizations, other farms,and stores with the hope that they would also follow us so we could grow our following.

I made connections with other local businesses who had a strong influence on social media and began asking them questions. I asked other farmers we knew who they liked to follow on social media. I learned alot from another CSA farm near Toledo, Ohio who helps farmers with social media marketing (mydigitalfarmer). I attended online marketing courses for farmers.I joined every newsletter I could find that helped farmers with social media. I learned that hashtags were important and which ones would draw more people to our account. I tried to offer more than vegetable content such as day in life, polls, and recipes.

I tried to tag other accounts who had many followers, hoping that my post would be re-posted, making our farm account visible to other followers. I began purchasing from other vendors at farmers markets and using their items such as olive oil or seasoning with our vegetables while cooking and then would post the end result. Again I would tag the products I was using to expand our farm account to new customers.

These things may seem like common sense for most, but for me it was a whole new way of using social media and a huge learning curve. Our social media accounts are still small in comparison to others but within a short time we reached over 500 followers and I could not have been more excited. Social media changes each day so it is always a work in progress but it is one of the best ways we can connect with our customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.haffeyfamilyfarm.com
• Instagram: @haffey_family_farm
• Other: Facebook: @haffeyfamilyfarm Tik Tok: @haffeyfamilyfarm

Image Credits
Kendra Reese Photography Haffey Family Farm