26 Sep 2004
A Wasted Day

Yesterday was the Festival of the Turning Leaves in Thorntown, which is where we usually go on Saturfday mornings for the community farmers market. We had high hopes for a great day, as this festival attracts about 15,000 visitors every year.

We set up at 9 am and left at 3:30 pm - in those six and a half hours we made four sales for a gross of $14. On a normal Saturday market we'll make between $50 and $100 in three hours. It just wasn't worth it.

It's made me rethink a developing sales strategy of hitting the festival circuit: I just don't think festival goers are strolling the festival looking for food: it's much more crafts/antiques oriented. Yesterday we sold two horns and a couple of sets of knucklebones (used as dice in ancient gaming) but only one pound of hamburger, two dozen eggs and a few green peppers. More people browsed the fleece than the food.

Today we're just hanging out and recovering - it was an exhausting day, and I we did pass out a lot of our sales literature. Maybe something good will come from it down the road.

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Organic Farming Studied As Demand Rises (AP)

The only problem with this: these are the same people that pushed the growth, mechanization and chemicals onto faqrmers in the first place, and most of their funding comes from large agribusiness (read: chemical) companies. I'll wait and see what they suggest before passing judgement, however, as even the most hardened chemical farmer is beginning to admit that we've been overdoing it for quite a while.

AP - Organic farming sounds simple — no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or genetically engineered plants. But succeeding at it can be complicated. A recent wave of research at universities around the country seeks to take some of the guesswork and financial uncertainty out of the practice.

(link) [Yahoo! News - Top Stories]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link