I’ve never worked in an industry where everyone is trying to help you. Usually the government is trying to either shut you down or regulate you out of business. The tax people are taxing you to death, customers are trying to steal or at least beat you down to the point where you are loosing money doing business with them. Employees are either wanting a raise, or in some sort of HR involved tiff with one another. As a business owner, it sometimes feels like it is you against the world.
Then there is farming. Nearly all the government people I know are actually here to help. We are exempt from many of the requirements of a normal business, for things like a business license, unemployment tax, etc. Even our license plates cost 1/2 as much as normal.
Our customers routinely remind us we forgot to charge them for something rather than stealing products off the shelf as happens in a normal store. We have people routinely asking if they can volunteer to work here, for free.
Recently we had the daughter of one of our customers mention that she was pretty good at Instagram.
Grumpy farmer who accidentally walked into this conversation, “That’s nice. I used Instagram before. My Goddaughter signed me up. I didn’t really like it. Too cumbersome.”
Random girl I’m being nice to, “Well it works pretty good. We have a tiny little farm and we have a lot of followers.”
Mostly distracted farmer, “Uh huh. Good for you. I use Facebook because, you know, I’m old. That is what old people use. We’ve got like 1800 likes or something so we are doing pretty good.”
Girl who seems to know what she’s talking about but probably doesn’t, “Well, we do well with Instagram. I have about 23,000 likes.”
Idiot farmer who should have been paying attention, “Wait, what? On a farm that doesn’t sell anything?”
Really smart and beautiful young lady, “Yep.”
Stupid farmer who is now paying attention, “Soo…. Do you work for chocolate milk?”
So everyone, meet Emily of Wilders Homestead. She is taking over our LONG dormant Instagram account and teaching me the dark and mysterious ways of internetting and socializing with media. This will be a stretch since I’m not exactly social anyway, preferring to stay home and mind my own business. But according to Emily, if I want to be one of the cool kids, I have to step up my game.
Emily has already started posting some items to our Instagram page and there is plenty more to come. Emily is indeed working for chocolate milk. She just wants to help us and see us succeed, and we are very thankful for the help. There is no way to tell who is doing the posting because she is basically logged in as me. However for our normal followers, you’ll know because her posts are well written, thoughtful, positive, detailed, and uplifting. Mine, as usual, are not those things ranging more towards sarcastic, snarky, funny, and usually completely skipping the info you needed in the post in the first place. Hey it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! This way you’ll be able to tell us apart.