My personal favorite part of being part of a small family owned business is the opportunity to attend small farm and good food conferences and trade shows across the mid-west. Few teams work better then a small family unit, and I take great joy in developing our plan of action on the car ride there, setting up our booth, and proceeding to implement our plan of action. These conferences create a wonderful opportunity to market to, and gain new information from others involved in the good foods business. The Good Foods Festival and Conference held in Chicago every March for the past ten years is a wonderfully organized conference with a good combination of events, lecture, and trade show time.
This year Jessica has the wonderful opportunity to take part in the Good Food Conference’s Financing Fair. She’ll be pitching our idea for an expanded produce aggregation facility to help promote produce agriculture here in Indiana. Indiana is the 14th largest Agriculture state in the U.S., and yet we import 95% of our food from outside the state. Our primary focus here at This Old Farm is to support a local, diversified and de-centralized food operation. Our hope is to utilize this lettuce crop in order to develop enough magnitude to help our smaller farmers be able to market their own produce through us.
These events are a wonderful way to get re-energized to do what we’re passionate about. Meeting with other people, and hearing all the wonderful success stories rejuvenates our faith in the good foods movement. For more information about the Good Foods conference in Chicago, click here. We hope to come back with a variety of contacts and new ideas to help better our products and services, wish us luck!
Conner Smith