A little perspective

Thank you for the kind words and comments on my last post. I’ve been a
little down for the past few days due to some negative feedback received about the Festival. Some of it was well deserved (the grounds were extremely muddy and parking was practically mud soup by the end of the weekend). I know we cannot make everyone happy and there is probably one negative complaint out of 1,000 happy customers. I
appreciate and welcome constructive criticism. If you see something that you have a good idea about improving, please let me know. I’d love to hear it.

I think a lot of people see the business as a well established, well oiled machine. While we have been making syrup on the farm for almost 30 years, this is only the second year that the business has been
owned and operated by myself, Robert, Jen and Nic. In previous years, the business was operated as a seasonal hobby by my parents. My father had a well established career, so it wasn’t detrimental if the business had a great year or a bad year. The four of us are all under the age of 32 (Robert is the old man of the family), Robert and I have
a young son, and we all work regular full time jobs in addition to running the farm. While it won’t be crisis to our families if the farm doesn’t make a profit at this time, taking a loss every year isn’t a
viable option for us.

Making syrup is a weather dependant farming activity. We have no control over how much syrup we produce each year. We can do things that improve our syrup making process (replacing our tubing system, converting to a different spile size) and make our syrup making
process more efficient (new reverse osmosis machine, log splitter last
year, tractor last year), but we can’t make the sap come out of the trees if the weather conditions aren’t exactly right. The last two years have had very unfavorable weather conditions. We need a freeze/thaw pattern. We had an extremely cold winter last year
followed by a very warm spring. Same thing is happening this year. When the weather is negative one week, followed by 60s the next week, our season is basically over.

Now that we are operating the business, and running it like a business, we have had to make several changes in order to survive. We aren’t doing things like charging for the games ($1.00 for 5 tickets, each game costs 1 or 2 tickets) to get rich and nickel and dime our
customers, we are doing it so we can break even and pay our staff members to run the Festival. For example, if we have 6 people running the game area for 4 days from 9-5am, that is 192 paid employee hours. Let’s use a nice even number at $10/hour. That means we are paying $1,920 in labor for what used to be a free activity. By charging a
very small fee ($0.20 per ticket if you buy 5), we are able to cover most of our labor costs associated with paying the 6 people to run the activity each day.

Several people complained that there was a small fee for the candle making activity, which is $1.50 per candle. The candle making activity is run by a local youth group and 100% of the profits are donated to that charity. They don’t make a huge profit, but the little bit that
they do receive goes a long way to helping young people in our
community.

Same thing with the kitchen – our meal prices increased slightly this year (the largest increase was $1.00) and we started charging $1.00 per drink instead of including a free drink with every meal purchase. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even go to Taco Bell and feed my
family of three for under $25. Our most expensive meal option is $11.00, which is a half chicken BBQ dinner, served with three sides. Children under the age of 5 can eat breakfast at no charge. Two local
churches run our kitchen area and a very large percentage (lets just say it’s above 75%) of the kitchen profit is donated to the churches.

Lastly, one of the most often heard complaints is our parking area. We
know its muddy and it is not even remotely ideal. We get numerous
suggestions to offer paved parking. Let’s do the math on that. By my estimation and by using Google maps, I believe that we would need to pave approximately 27 acres to offer paved parking and pave the most heavily traveled festival grounds. I did a Google search on paving
costs and I’ll use $1.75 per square foot for an easy, round number. 27 acres converted into square feet is 1,176,120 square feet. So that’s $2,058,210, not including ground preparation, gravel and maintenance.

Anyone in the paving business want to weigh in on this?

So, no, we are not trying to nickel and dime our customers. We aren’t laughing all the way to the bank. We are genuinely trying to help people in our community by offering fundraising activities and share
our family farm with you. We still have to wake up and go to work 5 days a week to pay our bills. 4 months out of the year, every day after working all day at our “regular” jobs, we go to the farm and
work so we can make enough syrup to get through one more year. It’s
not easy. My tax papers showed a whopping $410.00 paid for wages I earned at the farm last year. We get cold, tired, muddy, hurt, and we miss spending precious time with our families - but we love this farm. This is where Jen and I grew up. This is where Mason will grow up. I hope that one day we can watch Mason’s family splash in mud puddles and fall in love with it like we do.