Our First Farmers’ Market

I was caught off guard a little last night when a friend said that she had looked up my blog to see where we were at with the Jersey Beef business. I had messaged her the other day that I was at a farmers’ market and she didn’t realize we were that far along. I’m sure I blushed a slight shade of dark pink, but I was really psyched to hear that she reads it. She is a really busy farm-wife-and-mother that works really hard and I am flattered she finds time to fit my little blog in.

Our logo with our new name too!

So, not to disappoint, here’s the latest. We attended our first Farmers’ Market as a vendor. It came with little fanfare despite my building excitement for it. Even though we thought to have strip steaks the night before to pump ourselves up, we were still blindly rushing around trying to get everything ready at the last minute. Things were rolling pretty smoothly – we even had our logo done – and then the printer stopped working of course. It was one of those mysterious issues where you have plenty of ink but it won’t print. As if it really was playing with us, it actually still made the noise as if it were printing but only blank sheets came out. I was able to get a few handouts before it decided to ghost print. We were headed to our local market anyway, so not too far away and we knew several folks there.

The results? We sold our first three packages of ground beef and I know those folks went home and had the best-tasting ground beef they ever had. The other vendors told me it was a quiet day for that market in terms of customer traffic. I was grateful for the insight from the other sellers. They were all quite nice and welcoming. I felt like they were happy to see us there and excited about farming. We had a few great but short discussions about agriculture. That’s another blog post though.

While maybe I was a tiny bit disappointed that we didn’t sell more our first run out, it didn’t really bother me too much. It really was pretty dead – I think everyone else in the world was at the beach. It made the day feel more like a dress rehearsal for us and we learned a few things right off the bat:

1. We need better signage.
2. We need bigger coolers and/or freezers.
3. We need to make TK a shirt that says “Buy Jersey Beef from My Mom.”