Ask someone to describe the taste of a fresh blackberry and you will get one of two kinds of answers. The first comes from people who have actually eaten one straight from the vine in the middle of summer — they will tell you it is sweet and tart at the same time, deeply flavored, almost winey, with a complexity that no other berry quite matches. The second kind of answer comes from people who have never really tried one, and it often surprises us: they are not sure they have ever tasted a blackberry. Not a real one. Not fresh.
That gap — between people who know what a blackberry can be and people who have never had the chance to find out — is exactly what the Arkansas Blackberry Growers Association is working to close, and Linam Farm is proud to be right at the center of that effort.
The Grant and What It Is For
The Arkansas Blackberry Growers Association recently secured a two-year grant with a straightforward mission: educate Arkansas consumers about blackberries. Not just as a commodity or an ingredient, but as a fruit worth seeking out, worth growing locally, and worth choosing deliberately over the pale, tasteless substitutes that fill most grocery store shelves.
The grant supports a variety of outreach activities, with writer and educator Leslie Carr leading the effort. Her work this season includes attending farmers markets and events across the state — sitting at a table, handing out fresh blackberries to people who walk by, and watching their faces. Last year the association ran a smaller version of this initiative as an experiment, and the results were genuinely surprising. The number of adults who had never knowingly tasted a blackberry was higher than anyone expected. And the number of those same adults who, after tasting one, immediately wanted to know where they could get more, was even higher.
That is the whole thesis of the program in a single data point: a lot of people have never had a real blackberry, and the moment they do, the market takes care of itself.
The grant also supports digital outreach, including social media content and web features on farms like ours. Leslie’s work is about meeting people where they are — at a farmers market on a Saturday morning, scrolling through their phone, or reading a blog post about a farm they are thinking about visiting.
Linam Farm as the First Feature
Because Leslie is based near Alma, Linam Farm became her first feature for the grant project. That means we are the first farm in the state to have our story told through this program, which is an honor we do not take lightly.
A video profile of Chris was recently posted on the Arkansas Blackberry Growers Association’s Facebook page, talking about the farm, the varieties we grow, the way we manage our operation, and what makes our blackberries worth the drive. If you have not seen it yet, it is worth finding on the association’s page. Chris is much better on camera than he will admit, and the farm looks as good as it ever has right now.
Looking ahead in the season, Leslie may also come out to the farm to film a cooking segment — likely either the blackberry crumble bars or the blackberry muffins, both of which are new additions to our product lineup this year. The idea is to show people not just what a fresh blackberry tastes like but what you can do with them in a home kitchen, which we find is often the piece that moves someone from “I should pick berries sometime” to “I need to pick berries this weekend.”
What the Blackberry Growers Association Does
For people who are not familiar with the organization, the Arkansas Blackberry Growers Association is a producer group that supports farmers growing blackberries in Arkansas through shared resources, research, advocacy, and now, outreach programs like this one. It is the kind of organization that mostly operates behind the scenes but whose work affects the viability of every blackberry farm in the state.
Membership in a growers association gives individual farms access to things that would be difficult to obtain alone: variety research, pest and disease management guidance, collective input into agricultural policy, and — as this grant demonstrates — the ability to pool resources for marketing and consumer education that benefits the entire category. When more people know about and want fresh Arkansas blackberries, every farm that grows them benefits.
This is how sustainable local agriculture works at its best. Individual farms compete with each other on the quality of their product and the experience of their operation, but they collaborate on building the market for the category itself. A rising tide lifts all blackberry boats.
What Makes an Arkansas Blackberry Worth Seeking Out
Since we are on the subject of educating people about blackberries, we want to spend a moment on what actually makes a locally grown, farm-fresh blackberry different from what you might find in a grocery store.
Commercial blackberries are bred and harvested for a very different set of priorities than what a small farm produces. They need to survive multi-day shipping, extended cold storage, and handling at multiple points in the supply chain. That means they are picked before they are fully ripe, when the berry is firm enough to survive the journey but before the sugars have fully developed. The flavor is a compromise — adequate, recognizable, but not what the fruit is capable of.
A blackberry picked at peak ripeness, from a plant that has been tended throughout the season and harvested the morning you eat it, is a fundamentally different eating experience. The fruit is soft enough that it yields with almost no pressure. The flavor is fully developed — sweet without being cloying, tart in a way that brightens the sweetness rather than fighting it, with a depth that carries some of the characteristics of a very good dark berry wine. The juice runs, which is inconvenient but also the best possible sign that what you are eating is the real thing.
This is what Leslie Carr is handing to people at farmers markets when she asks them to try a blackberry. Not a commercial berry from a clamshell box. A fresh, ripe, Arkansas-grown blackberry at the peak of the season. The response, reliably, is the same: why have I not been eating these?
Our Blackberry Operation at Linam Farm
Linam Farm has been growing blackberries since 2023, and the varieties we cultivate were selected specifically for flavor, performance in Arkansas growing conditions, and their fit with the way we manage our operation. We use a rotating cross-arm trellis system that allows us to manage the canes throughout the season with precision, protecting the fruit from adverse conditions and positioning it for optimal sun exposure during ripening.
Our blackberries are sold pre-picked from the farm store throughout the season and are available for u-pick in the fields on scheduled picking days. We also process them into blackberry jam, blackberry jelly, and blackberry barbecue sauce, all made with real fruit and available in the store year-round. Later this season, we are adding blackberry dessert sauce and blackberry applesauce to the product lineup once we have enough fruit processed through the university extension program.
If you pick berries at the farm and want to know what to do with them beyond eating them straight from the bucket on the drive home — which is an entirely valid and highly recommended strategy — we have a growing collection of recipes on the blog. The crumble bar recipe is worth starting with.
The Northwest Arkansas Local Food Guide Feature
Beyond the Blackberry Growers Association work, Linam Farm is also featured in the Northwest Arkansas Local Food Guide this year. It is a regional publication designed to help consumers in northwest Arkansas find locally grown and produced food, and our listing includes a profile, a photograph, and our contact information.
We invested in this listing because we believe in the value of the channel — a publication aimed specifically at people who are already motivated to buy local food, telling them where to find it. The response has been immediate and gratifying. We have heard from customers who found us through the guide and reached out about specific products, including someone who drove down from West Fork after seeing our lamb listing. Those are exactly the customers a small farm wants to reach: people who care about where their food comes from and are actively looking for sources they can trust.
If you have not seen the guide and you are in northwest Arkansas, it is worth picking up. The farms in it represent some of the best local food production in the region.
A Guerrilla Marketing Idea We Are Thinking About
Here is something we have been noodling on for future seasons, and we are putting it out publicly because we think it could be genuinely fun. If Leslie Carr and the Blackberry Growers Association end up at the same farmers market as Linam Farm down the road, we would love to set up a blind blackberry taste challenge.
The concept is simple: several different blackberries, some from our farm, some from grocery store sources, all unlabeled. Participants taste each one and guess which is which. The person who identifies the local, farm-fresh berry correctly — or who can rank them from least to most flavorful — wins a free u-pick bucket at Linam Farm.
The prize is not the point. The prize is an excuse to do something in public that gets people standing at a table, tasting blackberries, talking about why one tastes better than another, and learning something real about their food in a context that feels like a game rather than a lecture. Those are the moments that change how people shop and eat, and they are more powerful than any advertisement we could run.
We will keep you posted on whether this comes together.
How to Follow the Blackberry Growers Association
If you want to follow the association’s work and see the content coming out of the grant project, find them on Facebook. The video featuring Linam Farm is already posted, and more content from farms across Arkansas will be added throughout the season. It is a good follow for anyone who cares about local agriculture, wants to know more about what is being grown in their region, or simply enjoys seeing what goes on behind the scenes at small farms.
We will share their posts on our own pages as well, so following Linam Farm on Facebook and Instagram will keep you connected to both.
Come Taste What We Are Talking About
All of this — the grant, the video, the taste tests at farmers markets, the recipes — points back to a simple idea. A fresh Arkansas blackberry, picked at the right moment from a farm that has put real work into growing it well, is one of the best things you can eat in this state in the summer. We genuinely believe that, not because it is our product but because we have watched people eat one for the first time and seen their reaction.
Come pick some this season. Or stop by the store and grab a jar of jam if the timing does not work for picking. Or try the crumble bar recipe at home with a haul from the farm. Whatever way you come to it, we think you will understand why the Arkansas Blackberry Growers Association thought this fruit was worth a two-year grant to tell people about.
They are right. It is.
Linam Farm is located at 7111 N Hwy 71 in Alma, Arkansas. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for picking schedules, store updates, and content from the Blackberry Growers Association. U-pick blackberries and a full line of blackberry products are available seasonally.
