Inspired..................

Four years ago ... three farmers got together and said .... Hey, let's get a lot of people to drive out from the city and look at our farmsThey will drive from farm to farm...... like you do at a pub crawl.  I know, we will call it farm crawl!


OK -- I took some creative license there.  Actually, I have no idea how the idea came about.  But what an idea!!!



And this year, 1300 people happily drove dusty gravel roads, parked in hay fields and along the road, to tour seven small  farms.  It was amazing!

I had one definite favorite farm.......... Blue Gate Farm.  And it wasn't because Peace Tree Brewery from Knoxville was giving out samples!  (Although ... that was a GREAT idea! OK -- it might have been why!! :) I really liked the Red Rambler!)

What Jill and Sean did for the crawl was nothing less than PERFECT!  Tours, posters, demos .......... they really showed people the inner-workings of sustainable agriculture.  I was incredibly impressed with the organization that went in to "showing off" their farm.

As farmers ..... we give tours.  And we talk.  But the interpretive story is often left behind by many of us. I have been guilty of this ........many times.

Now, Jill is a professional story-teller........... and she told a great story about the development of the BGF and their products.  I tried to look at the farms with an unbiased eye. (Which was really hard for me to do since Jill is my hero!)  But I finally got the impact of the message from all the Silos and Smokestacks speeches that I have heard....... telling the story.

The Farm Bureau says that more than 90 percent of all Iowans have never been on a farm! (Thank you, Kim, for finding that for me!!!)

And that is in Iowa!!  When you think Iowa ... don't you think farm??? I constantly forget that we are two and three and four generations removed from the land and the lifestyle. But that means statistically.....of the 1300 people that went on Farmcrawl .......... 1170 of them had never been on a farm!!!

So it was more than impressive to see someone really tell the story.

Fantastic job!  Hats off to Sean and Jill!!!!  All of my 15 billion straw ones!

Comments

BlueGate said…
Aw, thanks Cathy! And you were pretty darn close on how we got it started. Thanks for taking the weekend off and coming all this way. Hope you'll come back next year...first Sunday in Oct : )

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