5 Years of Farm Dinners
Five years of farm dinners and great meals under the stars
What Farmer Bryan Petersen Learned from COVID
Parallels between farming, baseball, and firefighting that we can all learn from
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Bryan Petersen, a former major league baseball player, moved from LA to Gallatin, TN to farm. He is a full-time famer and part-time firefighter for the Gallatin Fire Department, Station No. 3. His reflections on farming, food, an dlife found on his Instagram (@whitakerfarmstn) are worth a read. These are some (unedited) excerpts.
What has Covid-19 done to the farm? 11/2/20
This is probably one of the more frequently asked questions I get – and it’s answered with a certain sense of humility and uncertainty.
I wanted to share what I’ve experienced here – and what I think we can expect in the future. It has been without a doubt the farm’s most successful year. At the writing of this email, we have sold over 14,500 pounds of meat throughout the community in 2020. Some of the new faces we saw only for a panic weekend in April – and some we’ve continued to see week in and week out. I’m happy for both situations. I’m glad we filled the freezers of those seeing empty shelves in the supermarket during the “height” of the pandemic, and I’m elated to see repeat customers show up on our weekly orders.
We’ve been through a lot. We’ve navigated through cancelled processing appointments, feed shortages, meat shortages, equipment shortages, and an increase in costs in just about every sector of the farm. Just to give some insight to what I mean, I’ll share some of those numbers. This is within the last 8 months…
A 10% increase in packaging costs, a 30% increase in animal’s costs, a 15% increase in red meat processing, a 35-50% increase in further processing (curing, links, patties, sausages, etc.), a 20% increase in poultry processing, a 50% increase in website hosting, a 10-20% increase in equipment and fencing, and a 8-20% increase in feed prices.
I do not know if these costs will continue to rise, but unfortunately this might be the new normal. I also don’t know what this will do to our meat prices, but we’ll revisit that situation when the time comes.
One last thing I’d like to address before you head back to your chilly Sunday afternoon. As orders increase, so do questions, comments, and concerns. Our “customer service” department is still run by one person -- me. I chuckled the other day when a customer stopped their conversation on the phone and asked, “Are those chickens I hear in the background?” Yes, they are. Noisy, aren’t they? I’ll continue to ask for grace in this matter as some of y’all have seen increased wait times in responses to emails, phone calls, and text messages. You deserve quality customer service when purchasing an expensive product, and I am doing my very best to give that to you.
I appreciate y’all’s support this year and letting me ramble on a bit to ya today. Enjoy your week, stay safe, and go vote!
Thankful for Customers 10/17/20
Now I know never to do a seafood sale and a beef restock all in one week.
Very thankful for all our gracious customers who dealt with longer wait times, farm-versioned traffic jams, and a tired farmer who forgets to run credit cards. I appreciate the treats. The sticking around to ask my how my week went. And the kind words that make this grind all worth it. Sometimes I spend all week asking why I got myself into this—and then Saturday comes and y’all remind me. Thank you.
Yeah, It’s Personal 10/4/20
After what felt like a never-ending week of farm work, I finally got little time to sit down and answer some neglected emails that were in the ol’ inbox. I’ll just be honest, when you build something from scratch that is so near and dear to your heart, customer service sometimes becomes… difficult.
I know the saying goes, “It’s not personal, it’s business,” but I don’t think those words were quoted by a farmer. No matter how hard I try and separate the two, I can’t. A farm’s success is directly related to how personal they make their business.
Even Pops knows this. It seems like he’s constantly getting back a little later than he should from his delivery route. Why? “Oh, I stopped and visited with the Paske’s for bit and I hadn’t seen Anna in a while, so time got away from me.”
Every email, phone call, text message, and direct message gets read by the person in the picture- me. Every animal gets fed, every box gets packed, and every fence gets fixed by that same person, too. I know that I can’t make everyone happy, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try.
So i’ll just leave this here, because Solomon was the King of customer service. “Kind words are like honey, sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.” Proverbs 16:24
Firefighters 9/11/20
343 firefighters died 19 years ago. It was the worst day in the history of the fire service. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. They got taken too soon. They didn’t deserve it. It shouldn’t have happened to them. But guess what the rest of ‘em did on September 12, 2001?
Went to work.
It’s really this simple 4/25/20
Famers raise food.
Middlemen raise convenience.
Pandemics raise awareness.
Famine is a supply issue. Empty supermarket shelves are a distribution issue. Don’t let the middlemen twist words and create scenarios that have you believing global food supply is on the brink of collapse.
We might be out of filets, but we’re not out of meat.
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