Sunday was the last day of the CFSA farm tour. We had amazingly perfect weather both days. Well, Sunday was a bit cool but as long as you had some clothes on it was fine. A few of us showed up in shorts thinking it was another 80 degree day. That didn’t last long.
We had all hands on deck for the farm tour again this year. Lucy was coordinating everyone while her husband Jason (aka Abe Fruhlman) manned the grill cooking up bratwurst samples for our guests to enjoy.
Crystal stayed over for the weekend and worked her normal Saturday but also Sunday as well. Plus she helped make cookies Sunday morning, getting in on my girls normal Saturday morning routine of wake up, fire up the bakery, then get to work.
Spork did his customary tour guide duty on Saturday, giving our normally scheduled tours as well as CFSA tours all day. Sunday a cold he’d developed got the best of him and he convalesced while SWMBO took over tour guide duties.
Wildflower and Crystal both manned the store, and directed traffic. The Princess was everywhere, manning the store, directing traffic, and giving tours as you see above.
Erin and Mark were both on hand to teach people about milking cows, and Erin’s girls brought their award winning show chickens up to the yard and taught people about chickens and more importantly gave people a chance to pet a chicken.
Dustin broke out his drone and captured some video from the farm while the tours were ongoing. It is always cool to see your environment from above. I especially enjoyed getting to check my roofs without crawling up there!
Overall we had a pretty good turnout on Saturday. Sunday started off slow, but by the end we had a good crowd visiting and at one point we had three tours going at once.
Takeaways for our 2018 CFSA farm tour were:
- This is the easiest event that we do all year. We don’t do the marketing. We don’t schedule the people. All we have to do is open our doors and host everyone when they show up.
- This event is fairly sedate. We probably maxed out at 20 people here a few times. Usually it was 4-5 at a time. Easy. We could double the number of people without even noticing.
- We did 75 transactions in the store Saturday and Sunday. Most transactions represent about 3 people visiting, which means we had about 225 people here total.
- We did a little more than double our normal Saturday business dollar wise. But we were open another day so that sort of evens out.
- Probably the most actionable takeaway is that we had roughly half of our visitors stop in because of the signage we put out rather than because they were part of the CFSA tour. Putting out signs on Old Stage Road, and at the entrance to our farm, brings people in. I’ve been reluctant to put out permanent signs but I am going to have to rethink that strategy. Signage works.
We’ll do the event again next year, CFSA does too good of a job not to be part of it.