Caroline, Zac and I love showing visitors around the farm. We’re very proud of what we’ve built here, and introducing excited shareholders and blog readers to the personalities they’ve met on the blog is always a treat. It’s lovely to see the farm through the eyes of others.
In the past, we’ve nearly always said yes to scheduled visits, even though most of them are from non-shareholders and non-knitters. In other words, non-customers. Someone is always at the farm and it always just kind of worked out.
Lately, though, we’ve been getting more and more requests for farm visits and having more and more people just stop by without an appointment or any notice. We have never been open to unscheduled visits, but it’s pretty uncomfortable to turn someone standing in front of you away, so we usually just show people around anyway.The thing is, it takes about an hour-and-a-half for us to show people around and send them on their way, which is fine is we have set that time aside, but isn’t when we have work to do.
Because, as much as we love what we do, this is work for us. All three of us work really hard all the time, and adding one more unexpected hour and a half activity to a day that is already packed is really just stressing our capabilities and patience to the limit.
Which brings us to the other issue. In addition to being the farm you love to visit vicariously through the internet, this is also our home. I have a duty to my staff to make sure that they can relax in own their home without being constantly on edge that someone may pull in the driveway at any moment. We’ve had carloads of people show up just as we were sitting down to dinner, as late as 8 p.m. It’s incredibly disruptive.
I’m probably over-expalining this, but I grew up in a house that was always open and welcoming to everyone. Hospitality was paramount to my grandmother and my mother. It goes against the very grain of my personality to say that someone can’t come for a visit.
Rather than putting the kibosh on non-shareholder visits all together, we are going to have a dedicated day for farm visits every month. From now on, on the first Saturday of each month we will be open for visits and tours from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. I know that this is going to mean that some people who are only in the area for a few days won’t be able to visit the farm if their schedule doesn’t line up with ours and am more sorry about that than you will ever know. But we’re going to stick to this policy for non-shareholders very firmly. No one likes saying no, but I’m afraid we will be saying it.
I hope you can understand that this is a necessary change. I am incredibly grateful to each of you for reading and commenting on the blog, buying our yarn and shares, and offering your support and cheerleading when we need it. None of this is a reflection on my gratitude to you, which is vast and true.
ETA: I don’t believe that the people who’ve been stopping by are being intentionally impolite at all. They are just excited about seeing the animals and meeting us. We just aren’t set up to handle that kind of traffic.
