Yep, the total number of video views on our YouTube channel has hit the 35,000 mark.
It’s fun sharing the place we live and the animals we meet…
We also enjoy the fact that folks seem to like our ‘how-to’ videos. Our videos on roto-tilling and preparing cactus get the most views.
Do you have any ideas for videos you think we should make?
We got an e-mail from someone in England who tells us…
“Greetings!
Just wanted to make sure . . . you don’t ship outside North America, is that correct? If not, would you consider shipping to England for a charge? I’d be happy to pay whatever postal fee is necessary.
I ask because I’ve been looking for a new source of cactus for salsa since the only exotic foods company I know of that sold nopalitos here in England discontinued them (because they didn’t advertise it, and I was about the only person in the whole country buying the stuff). I really need to find a new source of cactus, because it’s extremely good for any digestive problems that crop up, including IBS. Plus, my cactus salsa is extremely popular with several people over here, and I may need to place regular orders. Crossing my fingers, I remain
Yours sincerely, Nigel”
My (long-winded) response….
Howdy Nigel, (that’s a cool name, one us US folks only hear on TV program worn by a real Brit!).
It’s tough shipping cactus around due to the complex laws and such….
generally there is a ‘phytosanitary’ report that must by done by our Ag officials to ensure your officials there are no bugs on the leaves.
We’ve been able to get a blanket approval to ship to Canada due to the low risk of our plants… and all the licenses showing we conform to standards.
It might be we could do something like that with you if we’re lucky…. because the phyto costs me $65 for each report, and it must be done for each shipment. Also, we have to drive the leaves to the town with the ag dept and show them to the officials, it’s a 20 mile drive just to get there…. so we charge $100 for the report to cover gas and time…..
Now, the fellow in Canada who bought from us and took it into Canada over the border got with his officials, showed them our licenses at www.rivenrock.com/licenses.html including the protected plant permit etc. They saw that our leaves are pretty smooth and easy to see any infestation, he went through all the hoops, permits and approvals… and now we have a blanket approval to ship to him alone with no phyto required.
I know what you mean about the salsa, it’s good stuff. I bet you’d like our leaves better than what you got before.
Where were the other leaves coming from? I hate to negatively impact my business, but are there any available from a Mediterranean country?… all places I think would be able to grow cactus well.
What I’d really like is someone in EU who wants to buy our cactus in bulk, and have his own business reselling it in EU like the Canadian fellow does. Perhaps one box every now and then as he builds the business… then two at a time… I’m in no rush… but it would be nice to have market potential in EU.
In fact, our leaves are so VERY good and easy to clean, and delightfully tasty and crunchy that I think you’ll be blown away. It could be there’d be market potential there if the market gets developed by someone.
Buying leaves from us in this way… we’d give you some pretty good pricing (of course it’d not overtake the horrendous shipping costs)…..we think if someone is working to develop a virgin market (hard to do), they deserve some consideration with the price.
So, perhaps the first thing to do is to ask your local Ag officials what they think…. perhaps they can direct you to the ‘Big Boys’ in government who would be inspecting it upon arrival. If they see our website, and our certifications and such, they might like the idea enough to give you some consideration.
I know it is a hassle…. but moving bugs from country to country is not anything one wants to do, the monetary and environmental impact of creatures moving across continents is horrendous (we deal with this all the time in the US), and our county is about to be quarantined due to a particular foreign moth found forty miles form here. We’re exempt from the quarantine due to absence of the moth when they inspected a few days ago…. but knowing the problems it causes…. I want to make sure we do everything legally and correctly so we aren’t the locus of some new bug that devastates Europe! I mean, us Amis have enough people mad at us without sending noxious insects to you good folks…..
I’ll put this conversation up on our blog, perhaps someone who has the perfect answer will see it and give us help. Also, I’ll refer our own ag officials to it so they can refer us to the appropriate officials in England. They are helpful and want to help local growers sell, they just want to make sure the people do it properly and don’t cause any problems. So if you don’t know who to contact there… I will likely have some names and numbers you can call and ask for help…. so that you’ll have a place to start.
I’m glad you like cactus…. I’d like to supply cactus to the EU… and our organic certifications are good for EU… so it’s considered organic by law.
There’s plenty of good videos out on the Internet….
Some on Youtube are being posted by the record companies. This is good as it gives more exposure for the artist… oddly however, most of the record companies don’t allow viewers to embed the code into their own web pages and blogs. Allowing such embedding would naturally give a wider viewership and possibly a larger potential market for the sales of the songs.
HBO has put up a snippet of scenes from the first season of ‘True Blood’, and they have allowed the embed code to be given out. So I present you with what is one of the most popular shows on TV this year….. True Blood
I’ve got family in the Asheville area…. and I am interested in organic agriculture… so when I see an article that has both, I perk my ears up and look into it.
While I like the fact that they are growing organically, the amount of sprays they use seems an awful lot. We use less than a gallon of insecticidal soap yearly…. part of our lack of need for control is related to growing the right crop in the right area. If we attempted to grow cactus in North Carolina we would undoubtedly face issues related to the suitability of the crop to the area and climate.
There is a huge move into the ‘locavore’ movement. These are folks who want to eat as locally as possible so that they use less resources in transportation of foodstuffs. Another important factor is the ‘freshness’ factor. Much of the locavore movement’s ideas and concepts have merit. I enjoy shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables at the local Farmer’s Markets. When I see foods there, I am pretty sure they were grown in California at least, and they also are fresh and ‘in-season’ foods that I will find to be good as far as taste. When you have your winter fruits brought in from half a world away… they will not usually come anywhere near the taste of something local grown in the right season.
But yet, a person in a cold-weather area might want tomatoes in March…. where to get them? They might know of a hot-house tomato farm, so they buy from them. But that hot-house tomato might have used more carbon heating the hot-house than a tomato trucked in from Florida. Also, vegetables that are ‘forced’ out of season by being extra hardy and able to ripen soon usually are not as tasty. When breeding, you sometimes have to give up one trait (like taste) to gain another (like early ripening). So there are times I agree with foods coming from a great distance while at the same time I bemoan the data that shows the average vegetable travels ‘X’ number of miles to reach the plate. And to tell the truth, I am spoiled by living in California. We (speaking of California as a whole) are blessed with a climate that allows us (until the water runs out) to grow almost anything at almost any time and season. Still, a wintertime tomato grown near the border is not going to really taste good…. I’d prefer to wait and have one in season.
Really, in the old days (previous to the first half of the 20th century) people generally ate what was in season, and would be yearning for greens by the time the first green forbes came through the snow in late winter. People ate dried fruits, oranges were a Christmastime treat, procured by smoke belching trains from the California fields at great expense. Now we have a semi loaded with tons of produce leaving the packing sheds in California, rolling through several states using less resources than a few decades ago, taking it to one large distribution center, to be again apportioned out to the various stores.. and people local to those stores making one trip and stocking up for the week with produce only a few days since being picked displayed with the bright colors of the rainbow on the grocery aisles (I love those colorful produce displays). In a way, that seems a more efficient distribution method than thousands of small farmers loading their vans and pick-up trucks going to farmers markets with small loads.
So for sure, local if you can find it being done with low impact to the earth…. but trying to save the earth by eating local doesn’t do a lot if the growers you buy from are forced to use earth-harming materials and methods in order to grow the produce demanded by the local market. It makes more sense to have each location grow the crops that work best for that area, and then ship them by the most efficient methods to areas that want the food, but can’t grow that particular crop easily and with low impact. Of course, in the end it will all come down to ‘The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace’ as it always has. We just need to keep ‘irrational exuberance’ at bay where we can.
“on the list today: Order Cactus for Sherman (our sulcata). @RivenCactus with amazing cactus and prices is my go to supplier”
and
“10lbs of cactus headed to my house. Sherm is going to be so happy”
We’ve got pretty good relations with many of our customers. We enjoy getting positive feedback from folks… we like learning when they enjoy our cactus. We also like to get suggestions as to packaging, marketing suggestions, etc. It is through the advice of folks who know that we learn so much more. Thank you all.
We have a query from a large organic-food distribution company… they asked me about shipping services we use, and what our shipments going out are like… this is what I wrote back….
Most of the individual orders are for five to ten lbs for home chefs for home use, and tortoise owners who feed it to their torts due to it’s phosphorus/calcium levels. It’s said to be optimum for shell and bone growth.
Those are shipped by a combo of UPS Ground or USPS Priority Mail whichever the customer likes. It travels well…. evidently even a week in the box is not so bad. Cactus has a unique respiration system… also the leaves are adapted to getting knocked off and washed away in storms to re-sprout the leaves downstream…. so when plucked from the plant, they shut themselves down to await the end of the journey. They have a waxy skin that seals the inside off. All in all, the physiological adaptations of cactus make it good for storage. You might find them to be good for a couple of weeks or more.
We also get fifty lb orders. We ship those by UPS Ground. They are in 16″ cube boxes… for your uses the one with the three smaller boxes inside would be best. This keeps the weight off the bottom ones…. we don’t get as much weight in the boxes that way.. 40 lbs vs. 50. But for resale, I think that’s your best option.
On occasion we get the multi-thousand pound order from folks who process them. Those are shipped by Fed Ex Ground by the pallet. Each pallet is billed at 1,000 lbs… but tends to be 1,125 or so in weight.
For commercial accounts, we give thirty day billing, and invoice with the shipment… that is if we are allowed to ship using your shipping account info. If there is no payment out of pocket for us, we are willing to give thirty day billing and special pricing… so don’t listen to the website on pricing at your level.
You’ll find our cactus to be superior for restaurants and the home cook who is a bit unfamiliar with cleaning cactus. Ours needs only a kitchen scrubber pad to clean. One or two demonstrations and your customers should have an idea of what to do with them. If you folks wish to do demonstrations, I am willing to speak with you about special promotional pricing and shipping using your shipping accounts. This will give you the opportunity to promote the cactus leaves at little cost to you. These are options we normally only extend to large buyers such as your company, and not made to the general public. My aim is to get more large commercial accounts. We have superior material…and while we have many small orders, we want to get more large orders. We have enough plantings to sell you plenty for some time… we have new plantings made this year that are coming into production, and we have more room to plant plenty more. So there is plenty of room for expansion.
This is a good plant, a unique thing, and the big company that gets in first will be well placed. We have a big internet presence… we have many links to our site, we’re well branded…. when we’re big, anyone who’s been selling our leaves for some time will be glad they got in when they did.
Yowzah! There’s a lot of folks on Twitter, the social network site that only lets long-winded people (like me) make tiny little posts. Folks, I don’t tend to do anything in a small way… LOL
I’ve been having fun looking up some of my favorite raw food chefs, gourmet people, and tortoise folks. Those are our main markets… we grow the cactus totally for human consumption.. but know that there are some folks who share it with their tortoises also.
One of the organizations I like and contribute to is ‘American Tortoise Rescue’ in Malibu California. So when I found their Twitter Page, I was stoked. I went ahead and ‘Followed’ them. I think Twitter has potential for me to use for marketing… a gentle way to put the message out that cactus is healthy and friendly to the environment.
We get occasional inquiries from folks in other countries for our cactus. The international laws on plant exchanges are particularly brutal to cactus. Cactus is listed as a CITES II (Committee for the International Trade in Endangered Species) endangered species. We found an exemption years ago in the requirement that the Opuntia cactus we grow can be exempt if the plants are verified to be grown in a ‘plantation-like setting’. Due to this exemption we were able to get a ‘Protected Plant Permit’ by appealing to the Federal Government (always capitalize The Feds… they are a deity in their own minds), submitting photographic proof that we indeed grow the plants we sell, and paying fees (that’s the real ticket to getting anything done with the govt). Using this and other documentations (you can see our licenses in general at ‘Rivenrock Licenses’)… a colleague in Canada was able to get permission to import our cactus into Canada. He is now selling our cactus through his own site at Sierra Madre Cactus Company Canada.
This makes it very easy for us now… we can merely send him the cactus he has requests for, and he takes care of all the cactus sales in Canada through his own company. So anyone in Canada that is searching for edible nopal cactus can go to Sierra Madre Cactus Company Canada and get the leaves we grow ourselves.
I’m like “eh, I’m kinda busy enough already”. But reading more about it, I think if I can make some interesting posts, you never know if I might turn the world onto the cool power of cactus. So, you can find us from the link below on Twitter….
