Commercial or Kitchen Gardens?

A Surprising Find of What the Market Wants.

Last year in September, I sent out a survey on hydroponic farming. I had 4 questions.

The response was overwhelming if a bit surprising.

One of the questions I was greatly invested in was Question 3

“My interest in hydroponic farming is…"

A). Commercial hydroponic farming for tomatoes.

B). Kitchen garden hydroponic set up.

C). Other.

First things first, if you participated in this survey (and received your FREE hydroponic training guide for tomatoes), thank you!

If you missed the FREE guide, it is again on offer.

If interested, use this link to request a copy

I expected that most of the responses would be B). My interest in hydroponic farming is kitchen garden hydroponic setup.

Instead, 70 percent of the responses went with A.

My interest in hydroponic farming is Commercial hydroponic farming for tomatoes.

I expected that people would say hydroponic kitchen gardens for these reasons:

1. The popularity of DIY kitchen gardens today.
2. I figured hydroponic is a relatively new (and expensive) concept, and most people are risk averse and would prefer to start small through kitchen gardens.
3. Plus, I had a product under development for kitchen garden hydroponic farmers.

It was important to examine my questions and find out if they biased my respondents. (I wanted to believe kitchen gardens would win - Mostly because I had a product under design for kitchen gardeners).

I considered two key aspects of my community:

First, the type of content I did and what kind of community I had built.

I did tomato farming. My community at that time was probably skewed towards tomato farming. Hence, the responses would overwhelmingly lean towards A because of the “tomato farming” part of the response and not the “commercial” bit.

Second, I examined the characteristics of my community.

The gender, specifically.

68 percent were male; 32 percent female.

It, therefore, makes sense that “commercial hydroponic” farming would be the most preferred. Right?

So, I did a further analysis of the data. ?

1.?? Question 3, Response C. Other

To address the first consideration (whether I had biased my respondents towards A by adding tomato farming into the response), I examined question 3 response C.

My interest in hydroponic farming is C. Other.

8 of the 13 respondents wanted to do some form of commercial hydroponic farming.

Got answers like

“Hydroponic farming not limited to tomatoes”

“Hydroponics in general”

“Commercial for herbs like thyme”.

“Home hydroponics but with a vision to expand into a bigger project”

3 did say they want to do both Commercial hydroponic farming for tomatoes and kitchen garden hydroponic set-up.

Conclusion: Not a tomato factor.

2.?? The Sex Factor

To find out whether the responders eschewed the “Kitchen set up” because most were male, I divided the data into two categories: Male and Female.

Of the 31 female respondents, 24 opted for the “Commercial hydroponic”.

Of the 84 male respondents, 65 opted for the “Commercial hydroponic”.

Conclusion: Not a sex factor.

Conclusion

Two general conclusions I made from these responses:

1.??? The only way to know what the market wants is to ask. And that our view of what the market wants can be very wrong. ?

2.??? People know what hydroponic is. And people want to make money off hydroponic. ?

The FREE guide on tomato farming is back on offer.

If interested, fill out this Google form. The questions have been edited slightly but it still takes less than a minute to answer them.