
What if you could reclaim hours of your time each week—just by documenting and automating the simple tasks you’re already doing? In this episode, I sit down with Glen Young of Cold Springs Organics, a Farm Marketing School member and...
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Corinna Bench
Ever feel like you're doing way too many things manually in your farm business, like copying emails and forwarding things and entering email tags, sending reminders? What if you could automate all of it? In today's episode, I sit down with my friend Glenn Young from Cold Springs Organic to show you how a tool called Zapier can take these tasks off our plate. This episode is going to blow your mind. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing. Let's learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show well. Welcome to episode 313 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business online. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my regular binge listeners. Really glad you're here. And if you're new to the podcast, well, welcome. Make sure you go and subscribe to the show if you like it. And if you're new to the marketing space and you need to learn the lingo, I recommend you go listen to the first 10 episodes because they are going to give you a really good overview. Another good place to go is to subscribe to my email list, which is mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe when you do, I'm going to send you an email roughly every five days for about three months and I'm going to drip out to you little by little the most important principles, the fundamentals that you need to know in the right order. The tools you should probably have, people you should be following. I'm going to share some free gifts and resources along the way and by the end you're going to feel a lot more confident and onboarded into the marketing space. So subscribe mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe great resource and it's free. Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. If you're like me. Winter is your downtime to plan and prep for for the upcoming growing season. Set yourself up for success with localline, the best sales platform built for farms. Localline is the most comprehensive software for farmers and food hubs that's out there selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers, running a CSA and more. With features like e commerce, automated inventory management, they have subscriptions, a box builder, point of sale, and more. Local Line helps you grow sales. It saves you time and streamlines your operations. In fact, on average, this is cool. Farms that use Local Line grow sales by 23% and they increase their average order size by 9.5% annually. So, ready to switch to sales software that does it all? Logoline has no setup fees, no sales percentages, and your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront for free so you'll be up and running in no time. As a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code MDF2025. So to claim it, go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and then enter that coupon code MDF2025. Don't wait. Start your season strong with Local Line today. And now back to the show. Today we're going to jump right into it because I have invited one of my former accelerator members back onto the show. He's one of my favorite people ever. I don't say that a lot about a lot of people. Glenn Young from Cold Springs Organic Farm. And Glenn is just a ball of energy. If you ever get the chance to work with him or even be on a call with him, he is so on fire. He has all these ideas. He's an entrepreneur at heart. He's not afraid to get his hands dirty and just get into the sandbox and start playing around with stuff. And as a result, he just creates tons of value, like he is building his business. I have zero doubt that he's gonna crush it one day. And it's just because he has this bias for action. And one of the things that Glenn has been dabbling in is the space of automation, specifically with a tool called Zapier. If you're not familiar with Zapier, you will be by the end of this call. And you should be if you have a growing farm business that you want to scale, because it's a indispensable tool to help you get there. And he is playing around with this tool and doing cool things with it that I have never seen. And I use it in a Very, very elementary way to do some basic automations in my business. But he's doing some cool stuff and I have asked him repeatedly, hey, we need to have you back onto the show so that you can be talking about what you're doing with automation. I mean, he's only been in business as a farmer for five years and he is setting up systems that are going to make his life so much more efficient so he doesn't get, he doesn't have to do these repetitive tasks when it comes to customer onboarding and customer sales and orientation, but also workflows with production. And I'm hoping that in today's podcast you're going to have some vision cast for what automation could do in your life if you're willing to take a little bit of time and learn the basics. And he is the guy that you want to follow. He is, he is the master, he is the mentor that you want to start learning this from. He is making me videos all the time, demo videos of how to do xyz. He's a great teacher. So I have him back on the show today to walk us through the automation playground, give us a tour and help us see what is possible. You're going to hear him talk through the specific workflows that he has created using Zapier and where he thinks you could start if you were just dabbling in the space. We're going to talk about what you need to have in your tech stack, technology stack if you want to be able to do this well and a lot of kind of lessons learned, mistakes that he made along the way, things that he would do differently if he did them all over again. Plus he's going to invite you at the end. He has an amazing free resource that you all need to go get. I'll put the link in the show notes. So if you're not going to listen to the whole episode, at least you'll remember to go look there. But this is a resource that is basically going to give you the step by step for five of the most popular must have zaps or automations in your, in your business so that you can just go get those set up and see how powerful they can be. So go grab that. And he will continue to mentor you and guide you if you are willing. I think he's even thinking about setting up a monthly get together over Zoom for people who are interested in learning about automations for free. So let me share some information with you. I'm pulling up his bio right now. He's actually been on the podcast before he was here on episode 204, which published back in March 29th of 2023. So if you want to go listen to that episode, it was a two year roadmap for new CSA farmers that he kind of mapped out based on where he was. I think he had just finished his third, third year and so he was kind of short, shortcutting that process and sharing some of his lessons learned. But he is better known as Farmer Glenn to his customers. But he's the owner of Cold Springs Organic Farm in Campbellcroft, Ontario. So he is a Canadian. Shout out, shout out to all of my Canadian fans. He has a background in engineering and he worked for 15 years in information technology. During that time he built enough of a real estate portfolio to semi retire and got to spend a lot of time with his young boys. And in 2016, he and his wife Amy welcomed a new baby girl into the family. Baby Grace. And her birth really opened Glenn's eyes to specifically the risk of climate change and problems with the industrial food system and that kind of set him on a new trajectory. So Glenn found a friend, an investor to help him form a joint venture and to buy some farmland to start farming carbon, as he likes to say. And his goals are just to make the farm an example for sustainability. So he is on this quest to prove that he can be a financially sustainable farm within five years. He's made some amazing progress and he's an incredible person to work with. So he's exploring how do you we incorporate automations into all different places in our farm business to help lower the cost and we're going to talk through that today. This is a fascinating discussion, a little bit more advanced, but I want you to just have your eyes opened. Some of you guys are going to hear this and go, wow. And some of you are going to want to jump on a zoom call with him tomorrow because you're so excited to explore this with him and he is going to be able to kind of walk you through the jungle. So. So let's cue this up and take a listen to my conversation with Glenn Young from Cold Springs Organics. Here we go.
Glenn Young
Well, Glenn, welcome back to the show.
Thanks very much. It's good to be back. This is going to be like episode 300 and something now. And I was here back in 204. Right.
So yes. So for anyone who's listening, episode 204, Glenn was with us and had so much good stuff to share. I'll make sure I link that up actually in the show Notes so they can go back and hear that sort of part one. But catch us up for. For anyone who hasn't heard that episode, give a brief overview of you, who you are, your farm, your business. Yeah. And just how your farm farm has evolved since 2023 when we last heard you.
So since 2023, I have learned a lot. I still have some. So much to learn. Basically, we're a CSA farm just northeast of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Then I was two years into farming. Now this is our fifth season. The reason I. If you listen to that episode, I talk a lot about what I would do if I went back and started over. So try to fast track the first two years of farming. So now I think about what I would do if I could go back and do the five years over again. So one important thing for me is the reason I started farming is after the birth of my daughter, I realized we're just not taking great care of the planet. And I wanted to leave the planet better than I found it and change the food system and build community. And I just think the world would be a better place if we had one small farm for every hundred families. And I really hope to prove that with our farm, to prove that it can be environmentally and economically sustainable and to help young people leverage our methods and, and start their own farms and, you know, really help with this movement that all the cool farmers are doing, you know, across the planet, I guess. So. I guess what I've learned is that selling organic vegetables is really hard. I feel like in my area, we're competing against Costco. We're competing, competing against salt, sugar, and fat. And we're trying to sell real food to people who are really busy in the greater Toronto area and have busy lives. And now we've even got some uncertainty in the economy. So making the sales is challenging. But we're slowly adding more CSA customers. By last season, I had 62 members, and I'm hoping for closer to 80 this season. I basically am designing my farm based on your farm, Corinna. So I've added the online store and our average revenue per member, our arm, as I call it, has gone up from about $440 per member in 2023 to 611 in 2024. So just getting those additional sales from customers who have added things to their delivery has really helped us. We've added mushrooms, which are cool. We've made our kitchen into a commercial kitchen. We sell prepackaged salads now. We make our own dressings, which were a big Hit. We did this very cool project for University Health Network, the social medicine center in downtown Toronto, thanks to a philanthropic donation. And we brought them salads and fresh veggies and just the people that are really underserved in the homeless community. And it was cool to just get our nutrient dense produce to them. And I'm hoping to build on that this season. We're going to get into seasonal soups and bringing them more stuff that they can eat, you know, already prepared for the chili and curries and different things like that. So if there are listeners that have gone this route, I'd love to hear their feedback about things that were a big hit. And so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on.
Oh, it sounds like you're iterating all the time, trying new things, which is, I think, one of your strengths. You've said to me before that farming feels like you're wearing 20 hats. I know a lot of people listening right now are nodding their heads. So what are some of the roles that you currently juggle at this stage? Your five year stage?
Yeah. So, I mean, you think about the funny thing with farmers is we want to do everything ourselves. And for one, you know, we don't have the money to outsource a lot of it and, or feel we don't. And secondly, we just like to understand what's happening behind the scenes and that's just the nature of us. And you know, if you think about something like making compost, you could spend your whole life learning how to make compost. And that's just one tiny part of the job that we have to do. And we hold a high standard for ourselves in every aspect too. So, like whether it's bookkeeping or HR manager, social media manager, you know, I was doing IT support for myself before this podcast. You know, CEO, project manager, mechanic, organic certification expert, farmers market coordinator. I mean, there's a million things that we have to do in a given day and it really stretches us pretty thin. And that's in addition to keeping up with the weeds and harvests and all of those things as well, the regular farmer's job that we thought we were doing when we started this business? I guess.
Yeah. I mean, was there a specific moment when you realized that you, you couldn't keep running everything yourself manually?
Yeah, I mean, I come from an engineering background and I worked in IT before I started farming, so it was a big swing. But I really realized when I was sending my sales emails that I was nervous about making sales because people would, you know, purchase and then I had so many things that I had to do in order to properly, you know, log that purchase and communicate with that person and make sure that I got the bins to the right delivery location and anything that they, that they wanted in addition to the bins and things like that. So I, I realized I was actually scared of selling. So that was probably the moment that I needed to start taking a more comprehensive approach to what I was doing.
Hmm. I know you've mentioned to me in the past that if you could just nail, nail customer order management, everything else would flow.
Yeah, so, exactly. I mean, I'm trying to sell and I'm thinking, okay, so when I make the sale, the customer has to, you know, engage with me, make the purchase, select the right location, make the payment, and I have to get them into the right communication sequence, all of those things. So I felt like if I really had that nailed down, then I would feel a lot better about selling because I'm not going to have this reactive portion to every single sale and I would have the tools, the technology and the process in place to properly give that customer the experience that I want to give them.
Yeah, I love this because you're right. When you first bring someone into the fold, you want to almost give them like a custom experience. You want to make sure that everybody gets the same information, right. That they need in order to come into the brand and gets indoctrinated. Or there's this onboarding process. You want to make sure that they get the second offer delivered to them at the right time, not too soon, not too late, and make sure that I don't accidentally ask them to buy something they've already bought or, you know, like you. And at first, when you're small, you can kind of do this one to one and manage it, but then to scale, you realize there's no way that I'm going to be able to keep track of where everyone is in the process and make sure they get the right message at the right time. And it turns into this, and you start making mistakes and it turns into this, like, horrible experience for you, maybe even for the customer. And you're right. You start to be afraid to sell because you can't promise, you can't feel confident that the order fulfillment piece is going to be a great experience for them.
Especially when you make a mistake once or twice, you know, like you get two customers confused or you forget to add the customer to your private Facebook group or whatever it is. And then you really start to get nervous. So that was where I realized that, okay, I need to make a recipe for customer order management and document step by step what happens in that process. And so basically we have a new customer that's going to come into the online store. They're going to register for an account on my online store. So when they register, I in the past I used to have to manually add them to my email platform and then once they make a sale, I would add them to my QuickBooks platform and I would tag them with the appropriate 2025 subscriber list and CSA subscriber and mushroom purchaser. And this is a bi weekly. I have a group who is in my odd weeks and a group who's in my even weeks. And so I have to communicate. I don't want to just broadcast to everyone or else I'm going to have odd week people showing up on even weeks and things like that. So I basically sat down and I said, okay, let's talk about what this process entails from the point the customer registers to the online store to the point that they've basically got the bin in their driveway or in their hands if they come to pick up. And so I like to use. We're going to talk about Zapier in a bit, but in terms of documenting those things, I like a visual flow. Zapier, which is an app you can find online. It's Z A P I E R. The free version has this thing called Canvas. Canvas is like a big whiteboard where you can put on blocks and you can say this block is the block where the customer registers and this block is the block where the customer makes a decision on whether or not to purchase and so on and so forth. So I just basically mapped out the process end to end from customer submits order. You know, I send order confirmation, add them to the newsletter, add them to the tag for what day they're going to get their deliveries, on what location they're going to get, add them to the private Facebook group so that we can share recipes and whatnot, all of the stuff that I've learned from you and basically get it end to end documented. And then once I've got it end to end documented, then I can start to automate it based on that.
Yeah, you don't realize how many steps there are in the ideal journey until you map it out. And then it's like, oh my God, no wonder people are falling through the cracks. Because if I'm trying to do this manually, I'm going to forget something or I'm going to time it wrong or it's going to upset my workflow and stress me out because I'm having a, you know, run to my computer like yes, in the middle of the day to make sure I tag them. Right now. It's just. Yeah, it's crazy. So you talked about documenting processes before you actually create the automations. Where, where did you start and how, how simple does this need to be?
I mean, I mean it needs to be, it needs to be as simple as possible because the more complex you design this process, the more steps you have to optimize. So we want the fewest steps possible, but we want every step to be perfect in terms of inputs and outputs. So when you're talking about customer ordering something, you know, it's gonna be the order initiation process. What happens when the customer places the order? It's gonna be, how are the payments received? In my case, I can take credit card or else I can take an E transfer, which in Canada is a common thing. It's basically email money transfer. And so it can be really simple and you want to give it a few scrubs in order to say, okay, where can I remove things? Like a simple example is I early on decided that I would have weekly deliveries and bi weekly deliveries and that created a whole bunch of complexity downstream that I didn't think of when I designed the process, but now everyone's used to it, so I haven't changed from that approach. But basically you try and make it as simple as possible, but think about all of the actions that you need to take. You don't have to put fluff in there, but anytime there's an input or an output, you want to have that documented in your process.
Corinna Bench
Yeah.
Glenn Young
So the reason I asked you onto the show today to have you back is because you are experimenting. You are doing some really cool things with, with Zapier. I know we're going to talk about Zapier in a minute. More specifically, you are really taking a look at what are some of the tasks that one could automate and build workflows around so that I, I have to set it up, but then I can forget it. I can walk away and trust that this virtual tool that I've set up is just going to do it in perpetuity for anyone else who comes through this path. And I feel like before we move forward, this wasn't a question on our, on our script. So get ready, but help, just help my audience kind of understand like what, what are some other you. You've given us one example but like, what are some other kinds of things that fall into this category of let's build an automation around it?
Yeah.
Between maybe some other apps, I mean, not just like our e commerce platform, but some other things that they could be using what we're going to talk about today to help them with as far as running their farm.
Yeah. So let me give you like some pragmatic examples because I know that's what I always want when I'm listening to a podcast. But I had a sale the other day and what happened was the customer went onto my website and they entered a question into the Contact Us portion of the website. And so I've used Zapier to notify me by text message whenever someone submits that Contact Us. The reason is, is because what happens, generally speaking, people have their website, when people click Contact Us, they'll get an email. And if you're out in the field doing something or you're driving or whatever it is, you're not going to get to that email until later that night. And meanwhile, the person was ready to buy when they submitted the Contact Us. So what happens is essentially the email comes straight through to my Gmail. My Gmail is set up to filter, to say, okay, I know that this email with this subject line and this sender is a contact us form. So I send it to Zapier and zapier receives that email and automatically says, okay, I'm going to send this straight through as an SMS message to the farmer. And then I receive that message and I get back to that person right away and I say, hey, I'm here to help you. Here's the locations or here's the details of the csa. And the person literally told me afterwards that the only reason I bought from you was because you replied to my, my contact. And so quick. And so now I'm like extra diligent to make sure that I prioritize that. So that's, that's another example. But you know, there's so many simple examples of tasks that we have to do on a daily basis. You know, I can go into the.
List, give an example of like, I'm just trying to think of common apps that a farmer might be using because they may not even know like what, what things could connect and talk to each other.
Yes. So, you know, in my case, I'll speak from my experience. So I got the website, which I use the free web website from Localline. Then I've got the online store, which again is localline. Then I use kit or convertkit for my email platform, which is another version of a tool like mailchimp, I have Square that I use for credit card processing. I have QuickBooks Online that I use for the accounting. And then I use the Google.
Right, Google Sheets.
Yeah, all of the Google Suite forms, things like that. So that's a subset of all the tools that I use. And so when you think about QuickBooks and Square and the Local line store, each one of those has a contact record database. And if you keep those contact records consistent across the database, you can have much better reporting, for example, out of your QuickBooks. So one of the first things that I did with my order management process was I synchronized every time there's a new customer registered in localline that's going to get put into Square and that's going to get put into QuickBooks. And then no matter what, I've got one source of truth across all those tools which tells me, you know what users I have. And let's say, for example, if you don't have a website and you use something like Google form in order to take orders, well, Google Forms can be linked to, to the SMS as well if you use Zapier and even the free version of Zapier. So every time someone submits an entry into your Google form, you can receive an SMS and quickly get back to that person, send them a welcome email, send them a welcome text. If you get their phone number from them and geez, they're just going to feel like, you know, they're your most important customer.
Yeah, yeah. It's almost like once you dive into this, which is why I love having you here and you see what you can even do, it's sort of like it gets you all excited. You're like, oh my gosh, I could just get this all pre written, all standardized and set in motion and then I know that I'm giving my customers like an amazing experience. Or you could even use it for logging your own data too, right? Like if you want to be tracking stuff production wise out in the field, like there's ways that you can be using these tools that way as well.
Corinna Bench
Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. All right, farmer, let me ask you something. Is marketing your farm something you actually enjoy or does it feel like a constant struggle? If you are like most farmers that I talk to, you are wearing all the hats and marketing always seems to slip through the cracks. Can I get an amen? That's exactly why I created Farm Marketing School. It's an online membership designed to Help farmers like you build a simple, repeatable marketing system that actually works inside, you'll get bite sized, step by step projects that make marketing easier. Each month you pick what to work on, like writing better sales emails or improving your website copy, or setting up your online store. And I walk you through exactly how you should be doing it. And you're not doing this alone. Every month we have a live Zoom meetup where you can ask me questions, meet other members of Farm Marketing School, get coaching and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a farm marketing mentor in your back pocket. This isn't some long, overwhelming course. The projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days. So you're making steady progress without it taking over your life. So if you're ready to stop winging it and finally build a marketing system that brings in steady sales, come join Farm Marketing School today. Sign up for your first month and see what a difference it makes. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com fms to get started. And now back to the show you've talked about.
Glenn Young
I'm assuming you're going to explain this now, but you have this framework of white belt, green belt, black belt. This is like a model that you use to describe how you can set up these automations or these farm systems, really even just to describe your farm system maturity. So can you describe this, this model?
Yes. So I mean I, you know, like when I was a kid I did martial arts and so I kind of thought that this was a neat framework to apply to it. But I mean if you think about when you're starting out as any kind of a farmer, whether you're doing beef or you're doing CSA or whatever, you know, you need a tool to take orders and maybe you just register those things from your email into Google sheets or something like that. So you're doing a lot of copying and pasting of email addresses and you're manually sending invoices and you're manually creating your pick list or your fulfillment spreadsheet or whatever it is. So that's like sort of you're at the white belt stage. You know, you got a new sign up, you're going to manually add them to your newsletter, those types of things. So I think of, you know, you know, the next level that I'm using is the green belt. So I'm skipping the gold belt, but we're going straight to green belt.
This is, I did taekwondo and we had different colors.
Okay, yeah, white, yellow, white, gold, whatever.
Corinna Bench
It is, orange.
Glenn Young
So the just know that green is green's supposed to be able to beat up a white belt. Okay.
Right. So the, the not beat up mentor. Mentor.
Anyone's done martial arts know that they're the last people to start a fight and they're friendliest people ever. But I just thought it would be a fun.
Okay, here we go.
So when you get to the green belt now, you've got automation in your order management process. So when the customer submits the order, you're automatically, you know, sending them a welcome email sequence and send, or your onboarding sequence, whatever you want to call it, you're automatically logging them in your database of customer orders, which, you know, for example, I recommend everyone to, however they're taking orders today, to get everything in an automated fashion into at least a Google sheet. Because now you have a keystone or a single source of truth where you can go and you can filter by pickup location or filter by product type or whatever it is. And now you're not looking in 10 different places for things. You just know whenever a customer places an order that needs to get into that database. So that's something that I recommend. And if you're a green belt, you definitely have one single source of truth. And when your team asks how many bins to pack today, you go to that source of truth and you know exactly how many bins that you have to pack. You know, things like automated invoicing. So when the customer submits an order and decides to go with E transfer or some check or whatever it is, you're automatically sending them an invoice rather than doing it in a manual manner. So these are the kinds of things that you would get to when you're at the green belt level. And we'll save black belt for a little later in this discussion, but I think, you know, we should all aspire to get to the point where we've got enough automation that, you know, is kind of handling 80% of our needs with 20% of the effort, which is the, which is getting to that green belt level.
Yeah, I like how you're, you're pointing out that this is a process. You don't become an expert at this overnight, that you actually start dabbling and playing in the sandbox. Like when you're white belt, you're just getting some reps, you're doing the, sorry, maybe you get the right tools and you just start with a few of these integrations and these few, these automations, you test the waters, you start to get comfortable with it and then you you make another step to the next color belt. Right. And now I'm going to add a few other things. And before you know it, one day you wake up and you're a green belt or a blue belt or eventually maybe even a black belt. And it gets easier. You get more confident creating some of these as you have success with some of the earlier ones. And I think you actually kind of get a little addicted to it, too, because you begin to see how much time it's saving you.
Totally. I mean, and I think as farmers, we think about this like we want to do the more proactive tasks. We want to get a little bit better organized so that we know, you know, the greens harvester is always going to be in that one spot and it's going to be cleaned and it's going to be ready to go the next time I pick it, or my amendments are going to be laid out exactly in this fashion in my amendments area. And that way, when I tell someone to go get this and that, it's going to be ready. And so in the thinking about the order management process or the marketing and sales process or whatever it is, if you think about it in the same way, and like you said, just every time you do a step manually, try to automate a little bit of it, try to make it a little bit more easier next time, then when you look back over a couple of seasons, you're going to have made great strides.
Yeah, well, and that's where I think it's helpful to have a mentor, somebody who, who has done this before. I know you have helped me immensely, you guys. I've literally been like, glenn, send me a video for how to make this SAP. And he has. He's been so amazing. And when you start to watch them, you, after a few, you're like, okay, I'm starting to see how this works. And it's not quite so intimidating to try and go in and figure out some of these things out on your own or see, hey, what else could I connect together and see? But it does take a little bit of help. And I think when you have someone, at least in the initial stages, who can show you even what's possible and start things out really simply, it does take away some of that overwhelm. So, speaking of overwhelm, there might be people listening right now who are feeling overwhelmed, who are like, what? I feel like you've just opened up this whole new possibility, and I'm a little confused. But what's the very first tiny step that you recommend they Take if they're going to begin to dabble in this space just to get their feet right.
So, you know, I don't know that I've explained what Zapier is very well, but yeah, let's do that first.
Corinna Bench
Let's do that.
Glenn Young
Yeah, let's do that.
Yeah. You can Google it at Zapier and what it does is it acts as an integration layer. So essentially it's like Google Translate between your local line online store or your Shopify store, or whatever your store is with your Google Sheets, or your Google workspace with your QuickBooks or whatever your bookkeeping system is wave or what have you. So basically it's like the glue that can sit between all these tools and keep them in sync with one another. But also it is like your assistant. So it can do things like when you receive certain emails, create a Google task with a certain deadline so that you know that every time I receive that email, I'm going to get a task, I'm going to get a reminder and I'm not going to forget to do that thing. So it's like this AI automation layer slash digital assistant and it keeps getting more capabilities. And there's other tools out there like make and Pably and others, which I'm planning to look into some more in the future. But Zapier is the one that I started with and works pretty well. And so the free version allows you to do up to five different automations, but they can only be two step automations. And in Zapier you call it a trigger. So the trigger is, for example, new customer registers in local line or customer order submitted in local line. So it's an action that somebody made and it will start an automation sequence. And so in Zapier terms, you have the trigger that starts it and then you have the action that takes place after. So my two step Zap could be my trigger. Somebody completed an entry on my contact us link in my website and the action is send a text message to the farmer with these details and so that they can follow up really quickly. So that's how Zapier works.
So that's the free version. If you get the paid version though, yes, you can do multiple steps totally.
And the paid version, I think the professional version is about $30 a month Canadian, roughly. And you can do 750 zaps or tasks, it's called a month. So it gives you a lot more tools to choose from. It connects to thousands of tools. So what I always do when I'm thinking about adding any tool to my tool set is I see whether or not it's got integration capabilities because I don't want those tools that want to only talk to themselves. I want tools that are thinking about, well, how could I share this information with other tools that, you know, the farmer or the small business might need? And so you can have hundreds of steps in a, in an automation once you get the professional version, but you want to keep it as simple as possible because if you add too many steps when you make changes now you got to consider the, the impact of those changes. So that's an important point I wanted to mention is especially these days, every time I document one of those processes, I take advantage of ChatGPT. I basically write it up in my words and I ask it, okay, make this a really nice clear process document so that I can put it in my Google Drive. And now when I want to add a new product or I want to make a change in the communications or I want to do anything, I can go reference that document and I can say, okay, when I make this change, when I change my email address or whatever, here's the places that I need to go and update it so I don't break anything. So again, you know, that's just one chat with ChatGPT and it creates that document these days. And now I put that in my Google Drive and now I can go review it and say, okay, when I change my order management process, if I want to make these two changes, what do I have to consider when I make those changes so I don't break anything thing.
Yeah. And so whenever you make one of these things, they're called zaps, Z A P S. So that's just some terminology. It takes a while to, to learn some of the lingo. But this tool has been around for, I don't know, I want to say at least 10, 10 years it feels like, but every time I bring it up to a farmer Glenn, it's like no one's ever heard of it. I don't know if you've run into that. You have to.
Yeah, for sure. I think it's been around for a long time, but I think that it has gotten a lot more non technical, user friendly in the last three or four years. So now you can do a ton. Like it's got something called Copilot. So you basically write in layman's terms what you want to do, which tools you want to connect with one another, and it thinks about it for a minute and then it gives you a recommended zap, a Recommended Zap. Yeah, step by step. And it tells you what the inputs and what the outputs are. And you say, okay, you know, publish that. And then you work through the details and you say how you want it. You test it at a detail level. Plus you have to, for each step in this app, like for your local line store, you have to connect it to your store for your Google account, you have to connect it to your Google account. So those kinds of things, you know, it helps you walk through. But the copilot piece is a really nice piece just because it, you know, now it makes it, you know, you don't have to be, you don't have to be a techie to figure out how to make those apps.
It's also free. And so, you know, at least initially. So I think there's a, it makes it easier to go and dabble and play around with it and get, get to the next green belt level. Right when you, when, you know, well, I can at least try to do five, five of these and I'm not going to get charged. In many cases, you're going to probably discover that you love it so much and it saves you so much time. That totally worth it to spend $30 a month for it. Okay, so now that we sort of explained what a zap is, how Zapier exists and how it connects all the different, you know, big software apps that are out there, how it can act.
Corinna Bench
As a virtual assistant in a way.
Glenn Young
What, what's the very first kind of tiny step forward you would encourage a farmer to take if they want to start dabbling in this space?
I mean, the, the first one, like I mentioned about having that one source of truth is to figure out how are you receiving your customer orders and how can you get those into one Google sheet. So in my case, I'm going to talk about a little cheat sheet document that I made in a minute and I made a video on how to do this. So if people want to download it, we'll talk at the end about how to download it so you can see it firsthand. But essentially what you're going to do is you're going to have use the free version of Zapier and you're going to make a trigger that says whether it's local line or a grace cart or whatever your tool is that you use for your taking orders, you're going to say the action will be new order received and sorry, the trigger will be new order received. The action will be added to this Google sheet. So when you create that Zap, you're going to take a look at Zapier will walk you through this. It'll say, okay, now you've created the trigger. Here's all the fields that you get. So for example, if it's Local line, you'll receive a field that is Customer first name, customer, customer last name, customer email address, you know, product fulfillment, order number. Yeah, order number, all of this detail. And so what I do is I go into my Google Drive and I create a Google sheet and I add those columns. So any of those fields that Local line spits out as part of the trigger I will make into a column on my Google Sheet. And then, you know, in the Zapier interface you add the action and you map from the local line order to the Google Sheet. And so when you test it, you'll see all that detail from your test transaction will show up in your Google sheet. And the next time somebody submits an order, you'll have a row in your Google sheet that shows that order in it. And now you can filter by date or by location or by customer or however you want to filter it. You got a super easy place to go and work with that data. So that, that would be the first one that I would start with and there's a few others that you know, even leverage the free platform. But definitely that would be the first one I'd start with.
Yeah. Again, just to get your feet wet. And it's fairly easy, pretty low entry, easy risk, low risk, I should say kind of point of entry. And then you get your confidence and you kind of see how the platform works. It's really, really smart. Do we need to. I feel like you already gave us some examples earlier, but I know this was one of the questions on our list. Do we still need to ask it? Can you share a few more practical examples of some zaps that farmers could use or set up?
Yes. So I mentioned the rapid customer response, I call it. So when the customer submits the form, given the text message, that one's a no brainer. When you get a new order received. If you use an email platform like mailchimp or Kit and you're currently manually tagging those new customers, that would be one that I would do for sure is to use Local line order received as the trigger. And then the action is going to be kit add customer to appropriate tag. That's very straightforward to do in Zapier. And now again, you don't have to think about it. It's one less thing for you to worry about on Your mind. The other one would be if sort of you're more between white belt and green belt and you're using something like just Gmail to take orders or Google Forms. You can set up a freeze app that's going to use the trigger of the email that matches a certain search criteria, such as certain terms that you put in that email or maybe you label that email in Gmail. That could be your trigger. And then again it can be added to the Google sheet or it can be added as a task for follow up and then that task can have a certain template. You can put that in Zapier and it's going to say, do these five things. Step one, step two, step three. Now you got a little list with a reminder set on it whether you use Google tasks or another tool for your tasks. I have a really easy one which is that every time a customer submits an order, I take that customer email and I send myself an email. Because Facebook doesn't allow these integrations. It doesn't allow you to automatically add people to groups and things like that. So what I do when I get a new subscriber, so I got a new CSA member, they submit an order. So I've got the new order received from localline. I get an email that's tailored with the link to where to invite a customer into my private Facebook page group in the email and then I get their email. So I just, I can receive that in the field on my phone. I just open that email, copy and copy the. The email address, click on the link and I can invite the customer right there. So again, I'm not worried about missing a task to invite that customer to the Facebook group.
Corinna Bench
I'm going to interject.
Glenn Young
Could you also send like if you have that master sheet that you might say no, but I, I'm wondering if this is possible. If you have that master sheet that's pulling people in as they sign up and one of the form fields is their email address, could you create a trigger like there were when someone gets added to that list, send them this email that invites them to the Facebook group. Would that be a zap or no?
I think you could. That's not a bad idea actually. I think you could do.
Exactly, because then you wouldn't have to do it manually every time you get it, you know.
Yes.
Feels like an interruption a little bit, but I, I didn't know if that was possible.
It's one of the first ones that I set up and I never thought about it, but I think that's a great idea. You could. You can. Basically, you would need the paid version, but you can use a trigger of new row added or column changed for a particular Google sheet. And then you can do the action of send them the invite. Because you could just use the same invite link.
Or maybe if you see that's the problem, a new entry come in and you could change. Like you could have a column that changes from yes to no.
Yes.
So that if you manually review that and you're like, okay, I'm changing the word to yes. And that change then sends the email that you have sent. I don't know.
I think that's also the problem is the content of the email has to include the link. And those links that you get when you want to invite person by link, they time out after 48 hours. So you kind of have to go into Facebook and make that. But I like that we're brainstorming.
We are. Okay. You guys all got to benefit from that. There's so like, this is why it's fun to sit in the room with a master like Glenn, who's just done so many cool things, because he. Yeah, you just kind of start brainstorming all the different ways that you could create efficiencies. Yeah.
I have another quick free one, and then I want to talk about a couple that are not free. This is probably something that applies to people in many different ways, and any small business can probably benefit from it. I'm sure that everyone receives emails on some regularity that might have an attachment that's important to them and they want to put it into a Google Drive or something like that. In my case, I have to get. Every two months, I have to get a water test, and the water inspector can request at any time for all of my detail. And so I receive the results of that water test. It's really an obscure email that I receive it in. It's kind of an obscure attachment. But what I do is I use Zapier as new email received meeting this search criteria. So it's from that email address or association that does water tests. And it. It's got this attachment and it automatically renames the attachment to the date and it puts it into my Google Drive. So now I have this Google Drive with a whole database of all my water tests. I can just show that to the water inspector or the health inspector if they show up. And they'll know that I've got my act together. So that's another free one that you can benefit from, is just keeping those Important documents into a place where you can always find them.
Yeah. Okay, now what about some of the ones that are a little more.
A little more complicated one is we have the abandoned cart. So sometimes I have people register in my online store and then I don't receive an order, and so I know something's happened. And now localline has added the. Two hours later, it'll send an email and say, hey, you forgot something in your order. But what I do is I say that, you know, 24 hours later and I could change this. I don't know if that's waiting too long, but I let them receive the email and think about that. But then I have a communication that comes to me, which is a standard communication in text message, and it says, you know, this is your farmer. I know it can be hard to buy from a farm for your first time. And basically I reach out to that customer with a tailored message by text message. And if I don't have their text number, then I email them. And sometimes that works to basically say, hey, you know what? I did need help. I didn't know the answer to this question. I was busy. But now the farmers actually reached out to me and I got the farmer's cell phone number. Now, like, that's my farmer.
Yeah, yeah. So you just reduce some friction.
Yeah, you reduce some friction for sure. And then the other one is, you know, the invoices, because they're such a pain. So when I receive the order and the customer selects a certain payment method, it automatically creates the invoice. And this is a more sophisticated one because you got to look up the product in QuickBooks. In my case, you got to decide whether or not delivery charges and tax applies. But the customer receives that invoice right away with, you know, the QuickBooks standard reminders on it and what have you. And what I've actually done is created another zap, which every time I see I receive an email money transfer, it goes and looks at my Google sheet, which is all my outstanding invoices. It says, okay, I found it. There's the customer. I'm going to create a payment. I'm going to mark that payment as received. So now already in QuickBooks, I've got everything 90, 95% done. And I just have to match the transaction at the end of the month. So that customer showed as paid up. And, you know, everything is, is, is good. The one, one really cool one I wanted to mention is I have this one called Harvest Intel. So, you know, we all get all these emails from our Farming associations from organic associations from all sorts of interesting groups that are talking about, maybe sometimes they're talking about grants. I always wish there was more grants. Like people say, say you're a farmer, you get all these grants. I was like, I there's student, you know, higher grant, that's the helpful one. But there's not that many. So anyways, the. But there is interesting things happening that I just don't have time to keep up to. And usually it comes across in an email from Farm Ontario and there's 20 things in there and maybe one or two of them are interesting. So what I do is I have that forwarded automatically using a Google filter, like a Gmail filter. It goes to Zapier, Zapier feeds it into ChatGPT with a bunch of prescript, let's say, and says, you know, this and this about my farm. You need to read this email and decide whether or not it's interesting for me. If it's interesting, you need to say where this email's from. You need to provide the link for me to follow up on it. You need to give me a short paragraph for why this is important and I should dig into the this further and then it puts it into a Google document for me. And then I receive an email once a week called Harvest Intel. And the Harvest intel has a summary from all these 20 emails that I should read. And so I go into there and it's. I always like it when I receive that email because there's like all sorts of interesting things that I need to know and usually like it'll say the email contact and sometimes I'll just send a quick email and to the person who's in charge of that or whatever it is. And you make all sorts of interesting learning, I guess that comes out of it. So I don't know, I'll bet you people on the phone are so creative, would come up with all sorts of more interesting things to do with this. But those are an example of what I've been doing.
Corinna Bench
And if those of you are listening.
Glenn Young
You can see he just, he's using Zapier or this automation process to act as a curator, as a virtual assistant, basically that's what you would. If you had a literal virtual assistant. You could be asking that person to do what you just described. Yes, go through all, read through all my emails, figure out, you know me, figure out what's important and then assemble this one document at the end of the month that or at the end of the week that I can quickly scan and just save me a ton of time. And so you've, you've created a process that works for you, that, using ChatGPT, that will, that will provide that. That's really cool. Everyone's mind is blowing up right now. Can you tell he's a black belt? Everyone? No.
Oh, man. There's so much more to do with the black belt.
Corinna Bench
Yeah.
Glenn Young
I mean, you didn't start there and I feel like we should bring that up. What were some of the obstacles that you faced as you were building out all these systems?
I think one of the things that I learned from experience was to take the time to document these things. And again, now with ChatGPT, you can do that in 10 minutes. You can have a really comprehensive document that you can refer back to so that you know exactly what that zap is doing and what the inputs and what the outputs are and what the considerations are when you make changes to your business processes. So I think that's one interesting learning. You know, kind of a, sort of a silly one, but it's really important is I've learned to use standard date convention. So when I take a date, I always think of it like an odometer. So it's year, year, year, year, dash, month, month, dash, day, day. So every day advances and the odometer is just advancing on the far right. So every single Google sheet that I have has always got that date format in it. And that way, when I'm using zaps, I'm taking things I'm putting out, I never get confused. Now, is that the date? Is that the month? Because all these tools have a tendency of, you know, using their own version for whatever reason. I don't know why. It's not just a worldwide standard, but, you know, local line is actually good about it. But some of the other ones are, are using, you know, their own standards. So that's another learning. I also using ChatGPT to coach you when you run into a problem with a zap. So, you know, some of my zaps are writing Python scripts and stuff like that. And obviously, you know, I worked in it for a long time, but I haven't been technical since I was, you know, since she's the late 90s. So my technology knowledge is ancient, but I'll use ChatGPT to write a script, to do something a little bit more sophisticated and then you can build that into, into your zap. And so it's unbelievable the stuff that it'll coach you on. So that's another, another thing that I've learned That's a big technology time saver. And also, just like you said, it's like we have to experiment with these things. We have to just basically try it, test it. You know, I, I submit so many orders for myself on, on local line, for example, and then see what happens out of that. Right. And hopefully, yeah, always test things before you have a customer come across a problem before, you know, so I guess that's another thing that I would mention. But they understand we're small business, so I think our customers are very understanding compared to, you know, some big corporation or something like that too. So don't, don't be afraid, I guess. Just jump in.
Yeah. It seems like you are looking through your business, looking through a lens now of zapier. Like whenever you look at anything in your business, I imagine that begins to happen. Once you dabble in this enough and you, you start to think through every new system or whenever you feel a pain point or a pinch point, are you starting to like, analyze it and be like, is there something I can do here with an automation to help solve this?
For sure. And also, you know, I guess just going back to that other example is as farmers, you know, I feel like I should be spending most of my time on selling and also on optimizing processes so that I can have my costs be as low as possible per unit. And that's how I'm going to be financially sustainable. And if I'm not financially sustainable, then I'm not environmentally sustainable. So it's uninteresting back to my core mission. So every single process that we're doing on the farm, I try to think, okay, when we're doing soil testing or when we're doing amendments or whatever it is, how could I make that more like yesterday, Corinna, you'll know all about this, but the organic certification I was working on, trying to automate that, it's like, why am I doing these PDF forms and these fillable fields and all this stuff? It's going to be like my next, next year's version of organic certification. You know, I'm just going to have to deal with the minor changes that I do. And when I have to get seeds from a different supplier or amendments from a different supplier or whatever it is, it's going to be minor compared to this year, you know, and past years where I'm filling out too many forms, you know, I'm having to collect that stuff manually. So I guess every aspect, it's reinforced that every aspect of small business, you know, that the Book the E Myth by Michael Gerber or all those systems thinking books, you know, they're 100% right on. Like, we can't just be focused on, you know, being in the fields and, you know, harvesting and all those things. We have to be thinking, taking a step back and thinking about, like, how do I do this efficiently so that the next time I'm a little faster at it and I'm more consistent, I'm not making mistakes, you know, the product's better, all those things.
So yeah, yeah, I want to make sure we just bring up the question of can you use Zapier with any software app? Because the answer is no. Like, there are some software apps that are not connected to it. And so have you done any research? Like, are there some farm e commerce platforms that aren't perhaps on Zap, or do we just need to make sure we tell them, go, go check into that or go bug your software platform if they don't. If they don't.
I mean, it's a really quick check. You just go to the Zapier main website and it's Explore apps and when you search a tool name, you'll see right away if that tool comes up. Like you type local line in there, it'll come up, it'll show you all the tricks, triggers available and all the actions available and what you want. The best apps for us to choose, in my opinion, are the ones that have a lot of triggers and a lot of actions because it gives us a lot of flexibility for automation. But if you're a developer of a platform, you're kind of hesitant to allow people to do this because in the old school, thinking you wanted to have everything within your fence and then you had minimal thinking about inputs and outputs and what format things are coming in or going out in. And, you know, people got in there and they got married to everything that was in there. So I think Grace Cart is one, but I think most of the CSA tools that, you know, you can name some, but I'm pretty sure I checked all of them in the last little bit and I didn't find too many in there. So I would like to see companies thinking more about that type of development in the future because, like, I mean, this kind of leads into the black spell, you know, what does the future look like for farming? If you want me to get into that.
Yeah, let's, let's do it. I mean, how do you see AI helping small farms in the future?
So what I always tell people is, you know, I, I want Jarvis I want to be Tony Stark in the Iron man suit and I want to have someone I can talk to. To say what? This bed that I'm standing in front of, what was the last five years of crops that were planted in it? What were the last five years of amendments that were planted in it? You know, predict what the soil needs are for this bed for amendments, you know, just from a production standpoint. But then we can go into the customer and we could say, okay, you know, does this customer like mushroom? I have somebody walking up to me at the farmer's market. You know, what, what, what does that customer want?
You know, you know, what do I lead with?
It would be so cool, like to actually be able to remember. Oh, don't you remember having that discussion with me about the, you know, peach and beet salad or whatever it was and stuff? You know, like, I, that's, that's really aspirational. But honestly, if you look at, in episode 204, I talked about ChatGPT and I knew people are going to be like, turning off because it's like, oh, AI. But the amount that is developed into a helpful assistant in the last two years is unbelievable. And I hope that it just keeps getting better as a helpful assistant and for that to work for us, we can't have everything in one place. Like, I need to be able to share my local line data with my bookkeeping in QuickBooks and with my production so that I can match demand, you know, for carrots or whatever it is to what I'm putting in the online store. And I really think that if we have all, even if they're disparate databases that are in different places, but we have that ability to pull it into one place or to query those tools and then make decisions based on it, I think that's going to be really cool. And I also think for farmers, you know, we spend too much of our times in the CSA case or whatever it is, like answering questions for from customers. Where's my pickup? Where's this? Where's that? Like, even a year ago I played around with Zapier's agents and you know, even then it's a bit expensive for me right now, but even then it had the capability of basically being my level one or level two help desk, and it could answer all the questions for my customers, the typical questions they would have, and I wouldn't have to worry about like, where's my pickup? Or you didn't have to answer those questions. Yeah, you know, all of those things. So, you know, and you and I talked last time about the, the database that I'm pulling together to check on customer recency and customer frequency and trying to predict when a customer might be at risk of, you know, canceling their CSA for the following year. And my goal is try and keep customers happy and keep them with us for a long time. Right. Because I know the more they eat healthy, the longer they eat healthy, the longer they support, support the farm, the tighter the, you know, the relationship's going to be and the more benefits they'll get from it from eating healthy. And so I want to predict, like what do I have to do in order to incent that customer, you know, to go ahead and make that next purchase. And if I know they're a mushroom person and I make a mushroom offer at the right time, then probably, you know, I'll tickle them pink and they'll sign up for a CSA or whatever. Right. So I, I think we probably have the capability to do that now if we had the time to really dive into it. But in a year's time, 100% we're going to have that capability.
Yeah. I mean, and all this is speaking to why we have to have these systems in place first. Right. Or we can't really take advantage of the AI to the degree that we could if we're, if we don't have things connected. And yeah, I just, I just worry that, that some, some farm businesses will be left behind if they are really resistant to at least exploring some of these tools that can augment our systems.
Yeah. And I mean, even if you just think about wanting to make less mistakes because we all hate making mistakes, it puts us into reactive mode. Now we're trying to troubleshoot, like just, you know, looking at how those orders and how, how the, in how the communications are coming into us and trying to get them in one place and trying to automate or automate follow ups or whatever it is, I think that's really worthy of our time and it'll benefit us in the future because now we'll have it in one place and we can work from it as new capabilities emerge. And the new capabilities will help the farmer spend less time doing low level things like answering a simple question about what, what they can do if they're going to be late for pickup or whatever it is. And so we can focus on improving the product and improving our customer experience and all those things.
Yeah.
Corinna Bench
You are a wealth of knowledge.
Glenn Young
I think people are listening right now going, how can I talk to this man? In fact, I did. I had, I had someone reach out to me through email and ask me a question that was clearly a zapier integration question. And I was like, I'm going to.
Corinna Bench
Give you Glenn's email and you just.
Glenn Young
Reach out to him because he'll probably make a video for you.
Yeah, that was Mike. I really enjoyed talking to you.
Yeah, that was Mike. Shout out to Mike. I know you probably can't do that for everyone, but you have some free.
Resources and yeah, I just like connecting with farmers, so that would be awesome.
Thank you so much for being on the show, Glenn. You're so much energy. I love having conversations with you and I'm sure we'll have you back again for the next iteration.
Thank you so much for having me. It was fun.
Corinna Bench
Wasn't that amazing? Some of you who are listening are starting to see dots connect and see what's possible. I'm unbelievably excited to see what Glenn is going to be developing in the next 12 months and I encourage you to get on that train with him because he knows what he's doing and I think he's going to open the doors for a lot of us farmers and really help us find some simple automations that can go a long way. I think he has the ability to go crazy black belt with a lot of this too, but I feel like the average farmer probably just needs to be like a green belt and there's probably just a few automations that you could benefit from. So getting a little bit dirty in the sandbox, learning how this works, dangerous enough that you have a few automations in place that can really help you. I think that's all you probably have to do.
Glenn Young
Right?
Corinna Bench
I don't want to make this super complex, but I think this is something worth exploring and it might be worth your time to just come in to his monthly zoom calls and listen and just observe and be curious, see what comes of it. I have a feeling it's going to go places. So today's show notes can be found at my digital farmer.com forward/313. Go there to find the link for that freebie that he's offering you. If you download that freebie you'll be on his email list and he will then be extending those monthly invites to his zoom calls to, to just kind of watch him build zaps, live and talk through different steps that you have to do if you're building systems and automation. So encourage you to do that. Now if you want to get onto my email list, remember I have a ton of free stuff stuff to send your way to make your marketing better. You can go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. If you liked today's episode, please go. Leave me a rating or a review on Apple podcast. It helps more people find out out about the show. Or send the link to the episode right to one of your favorite farmers and say hey, have you heard of this my digital farmer girl? This is really good. You should check it out. I'm also now on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I'll show up there in stories or reels. Would love to connect with you there and I hope you have an amazing week. Thank you for joining me today and I will catch you next time for another episode. Remember, I believe in you. Take care.
Episode 313 Summary: Building Systems and Automations into Your Farm Business Using Zapier
In Episode 313 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast, host Corinna Bench delves into the transformative world of automation for farm businesses. Joining her is Glenn Young from Cold Springs Organic Farm, who shares his hands-on experiences with Zapier, a powerful tool designed to streamline and automate various aspects of farm operations. This episode is a treasure trove for farmers seeking to enhance efficiency, reduce manual workloads, and scale their businesses through smart technology integrations.
Corinna Bench opens the episode by addressing a common pain point among farmers: the overwhelming amount of manual tasks involved in managing a farm business. From copying emails and forwarding messages to tagging customers and sending reminders, these repetitive duties can drain time and energy. She poses a compelling question: “What if you could automate all of it?”
To explore this, Corinna invites Glenn Young, a seasoned member of her accelerator program and a proactive entrepreneur, to discuss how Zapier can revolutionize farm operations by automating routine tasks.
Glenn Young is the owner of Cold Springs Organic Farm in Campbellcroft, Ontario. With a robust background in engineering and 15 years in information technology, Glenn transitioned to farming driven by a passion for sustainability and a desire to create a more resilient food system. Since starting his farm in 2016, Glenn has implemented numerous automation systems to enhance efficiency and customer experience, making him an ideal guest for this episode.
At around [37:32], Glenn introduces Zapier, describing it as an integration platform that serves as a bridge between various software applications. “Zapier acts as the integration layer. It’s like Google Translate between your online store and your Google Sheets, keeping everything in sync,” he explains. This functionality allows farmers to connect disparate tools—such as e-commerce platforms, email marketing tools, accounting software, and more—to create seamless workflows.
Key Features of Zapier:
Glenn shares several practical applications of Zapier tailored to farming businesses:
Rapid Customer Response:
Automated Customer Onboarding:
Invoice Generation and Payment Tracking:
Harvest Intel with ChatGPT Integration:
Notable Quote: "When you see what you can even do, it's like it gets you all excited... you can set it up and then walk away and trust that this virtual tool is just going to do it in perpetuity.” —Glenn Young [43:32]
Corinna and Glenn introduce a Martial Arts Belt Framework to conceptualize automation maturity levels:
White Belt:
Green Belt:
Black Belt:
This framework helps farmers assess their current automation status and set goals for further integration.
Implementing automation is not without its hurdles. Glenn emphasizes several key lessons:
Documentation:
Consistent Data Formats:
Testing and Iteration:
Adopting a Growth Mindset:
Looking ahead, Glenn shares his aspirations for integrating AI into farm operations:
Advanced Customer Interactions:
Predictive Analytics:
System Integration for Seamless Operations:
Glenn’s Forward-Thinking Statement: "If we have all the disparate databases connected, and the ability to query those tools and make decisions based on it, I think that's going to be really cool.” [65:39]
Automation Reduces Manual Workloads:
Structured Implementation is Crucial:
Start Simple and Scale Gradually:
Leverage AI for Enhanced Efficiency:
Continuous Learning and Adaptation:
Free Automation Cheat Sheet:
Monthly Zoom Calls:
Subscribe to My Digital Farmer:
Final Thoughts: Corinna Bench wraps up the episode by celebrating Glenn’s expertise and encouraging farmers to embrace automation as a means to achieve greater efficiency and success. She underscores the transformative potential of systems like Zapier, inviting listeners to explore these tools and join Glenn's community to stay ahead in the evolving landscape of farm business management.
Notable Closing Quote: "I believe in you. Take care." —Corinna Bench [71:50]
By integrating automation tools like Zapier, farmers can significantly enhance their operational efficiency, reduce errors, and provide better customer experiences. Episode 313 serves as an inspiring guide for those ready to take the next step in modernizing their farm businesses.