Dave Ridill of Clawson Greens shares his farming unique experiences farming in snowy Tetonia, Idaho.

Dave Ridill from Clawson Greens has made the impossible possible: in an area with a growing season that lasts less than three months (and is known for avalanches!) he has created a thriving year-round farming business that keeps surrounding restaurants flush with fresh greens even in the snowiest weather.

Download our interview with Dave to hear about his experiences!

Dave’s journey to starting a farm

Dave has had a wide variety of interesting and demanding jobs, including working as a ski patrol, volunteer EMT and forest service worker. His attraction to these jobs has always been the combination of mental and physical work, plus the knowledge that he was helping his community every day. So, when a couple who were Dave’s neighbors in Idaho asked him to help them fire-proof their small California ranch one year in May, Dave quickly agreed to help. 

Little did Dave know that this would be a pivotal moment in his life. Upon arriving in California, he was shocked by how dry and barren the land was (this was during the worst of California’s nearly decade-long drought). 

“As you’re driving through [Central Valley, California] everything is green and lush, but only because of irrigation. Everything else is brown. I realized that 90% of our food comes from here–our current food system was already broken. This is when this idea started popping into my head: this is where our food is coming from and this isn’t really working.”

On the ranch, Dave and his neighbors would sit on the porch in the evenings, sipping beers and discuss this food sourcing problem on a national scale and on a small scale when it came to their home town.

“It kept coming back to food. We’re in such a remote little spot which has one of the harshest growing climates…It was really challenging to get food [in Tetonia].”

Tetonia, Idaho is a small town of about 10,000 people. Most of the economy is dependent on tourism to neighboring ski resorts and national parks. Every year, nearly 4 million people come through the area and support the local restaurants and shops. In spite of a remarkably short growing season (only 85 days a year!), the Teton Valley region has a rich farming community. However, the availability of fresh foods is not ideal. 

“Everything gets shipped in, like in the rest of the country... For the most part, we have a pretty decent selection, but sometimes it gets pretty scarce, especially in the wintertime because we can’t get trucks in: the highways can shut down for days at a time and food starts to dwindle. The food that is there starts to go bad because we already know it’s taken a week to ten days to get to the store, and then it’s just sitting out and nothing fresh comes in. I knew there was a problem, and a market, here for a long time.”

Putting it all together, Dave and his neighbors saw the opportunity. Around the time the three were working on the ranch, Dave’s neighbors were consulting on a project for Yosemite National Park, which was looking for ways to cut down on transportation costs and add new food options inside the park. 

During their research, the neighbors came across Freight Farms and used it as the basis for their proposal. Yosemite ultimately turned them down, but the idea had taken hold. The couple brought the idea to Dave and Clawson Greens was born.

Creating a farm business model

The trio established a partnership with the intention of giving Dave complete control of the business within 16 months. The partners oversaw business management while Dave took charge of operations, marketing, and sales. Over the following months, Dave learned a lot from his partners and was able to buy them out at the end of their agreement. 

From the beginning, the group knew they wanted to fill a void by selling directly to restaurants in Teton Valley and Jackson Hole.

“We knew there was already a lot of strong support for our local organic farms. They were already going to the farmers markets and selling to stores, so that part of the market was covered. We never wanted to be in competition with the other providers.”

With a fledgling business strategy in mind, Dave approached a local bank for a loan to buy the first farm. However, before getting a loan, Dave had to do some explaining.

“They really had no idea what this was. They decided that they wanted us to go out and pre-sell 85 percent of the farm and get letters of intent from restaurants before we give you a loan… I was taken aback–how do I sell something that I don’t have.” 

Dave decided to pound the pavement. He spoke to chefs, managers, and owners about his idea of starting a business that would provide other local businesses with fresh, local produce year-round. The tactic worked: Within three weeks of just knocking on doors, Dave had pre-sold 120 percent of the farm.

Dave attributes a big part of his pre-sale success to a very eye-opening conversation he had with a local pub manager. Hearing about Dave’s idea, the manager agreed to look over his pub’s books, including all invoices from the past year. The fluctuations and the margins as a result of seasonality, weather, and diesel prices were clear to see.

Not only were prices changing unpredictably, but the manager realized that working with low-priced bulk shipments was not necessarily cutting his costs. 

“He was going off of bulk pricing to get the best price, and a lot of that produce was going bad. After our meeting, he tracked how much of his produce was going bad for a month and saw it was something like 30 percent. So then, when he added 30 percent back to the price, suddenly the more expensive local option really wasn’t that much more expensive.”

This was a breakthrough for Dave, helping him frame his pitch for other customers. If he could sell the concept to a bar, he could sell it to a high-end restaurant.

From idea to execution

In fall 2016, Dave got his first farm delivered and Clawson Greens began in earnest. In the beginning, Dave focused on providing restaurants with a wide variety of crops that gave the chefs the ability to customize their menus. Over time, Dave has adjusted and scaled back to grow only what they know sells and the restaurants will buy. Today, they sell a variety of lettuces, wasabi arugula, rainbow Swiss chard, red-veined sorrel.

“Those are the items that pretty much sell out every single time. Every restaurant has a way of using them, and it also eliminates the issue of growing a specialty green for a restaurant and all of a sudden they change their menu without warning and you’re stuck.”

For a pricing strategy, Dave started with competitive pricing on a per-plant basis.

“We started at a $1.25, which was a little bit on the low end, but we knew that if we got restaurants interested and buying we would be able to increase the prices over time…We were more expensive, but doable.”

Over time, Dave has slowly increased his prices. He posits that, for the restaurants, it’s very easy to change the menu to recoup a price increase on the supplier’s side.

In addition to determining a crop menu and pricing structure, the new farm business required Dave to establish a regular distribution schedule. At the time the first farm arrived, Dave was still working full time and decided to focus his delivery timetable based on the restaurants’ needs.

“We chose a Tuesday and Friday schedule…as we’ve grown it has evolved…This year we changed things around a bit and switched to a four-day schedule to increase efficiency.”

Scaling the farm business

Dave’s killer product and innovative farming approach quickly helped him land more accounts. 

“I invite every owner and chef up to Clawson Greens to take a tour. And, literally, you have a chef show up, you put him in–they’re going to buy something.”

Quickly, demand has exceeding Dave’s supply, and it was time to expand. The second container was sold even before Dave purchased it. Two businessmen starting a new pizza and salad restaurant in Jackson Hole and had tried some of Dave’s lettuce at a local restaurant. The group approached Dave and toured the farm, expressing interest in purchasing a large amount of greens.

“I said ‘Wow, that’s a lot, that would pretty much be an entire container,’ and they say ‘well, we’ll take one…we’ll do a purchase agreement and we’ll buy everything you can grow in another container.’”  

The next day, Dave was on the phone with Freight Farms ordering a new unit, and to this day the pizza and salad restaurant is his largest account. This, Dave says, is why you need to try and get your name on the menu:

“People want to support local businesses. For the restaurant, they know that advertising the local product will make people buy it, so they’re willing to spend more on it.”

Aside from smart marketing and his top-quality product, Dave attributes the success of Clawson Greens as a profitable small business to an unorthodox accounting strategy called Profit-First Accounting. 

“Implementing the ‘Profit First’ system is what really changed Clawson Greens. I went from a business that had money in the business account and was blindly throwing money around to pay bills, payroll and occasionally paying myself, to a business that knows exactly how much money to put towards operational expenses, taxes, owners’ compensation and most importantly, profit!”

Listen to the webinar starting at 35m20s to hear Dave describe the entire profit-first business model

Clawson Greens & COVID-19

As the business has grown, Clawson Greens has created and nurtured meaningful and personal connections with the community to bolster the local economy. This has made it possible to Dave to pivot quickly as his normal restaurant customers closed down. Instead, Dave and another local farmer have shifted to a direct-to-consumer model, establishing a drive-through farmers market that has sold out two weeks in a row. 

Read more about how small farmers are pivoting business models during COVID-19.

Interested in learning more about Clawson Greens?

Hear more about how Dave created his thriving faming business in some of the harshest conditions in the U.S. when you download our webinar!