Have you heard of a Jack of all trades? Do you know one? I’m sure that you aren’t surprised that a farmer tends to be one. He (or she) is likely enough of a mechanic to not only change oil or tires, but to be able to repair fuel leaks or replace and pack wheel bearings. Then there’s plumbing or electrical work. Most any farmer has at least a rudimentary set of carpentry skills. Then there’s operating heavy equipment or doing his own veterinary work. Back in the day, farmers had their father or grandfather to learn these skills from. Thank goodness for YouTube because I have a chainsaw I need to fix.
All that makes sense right? I mean farmers are hands on, dirt under the fingernails, type of people Mike Rowe loved to feature on his show Dirty Jobs. But did you know the modern farmer needs to be able to do more than just the manual labor type stuff? Farmers are business owners believe it or not and along with that comes the bookkeeping, records management, licensing, taxes and other stuff that most any business owner has to deal with. But as a farm who does not produce taxpayer subsidized commodity crops or anything else on an industrial scale, we have a whole other set of hats to wear. 
If we don’t find people who want to buy the kind of stuff we produce, at the price point it costs to produce it, then we won’t be around much longer. We have to learn to how to market ourselves, be comfortable speaking in public, how to compose legible emails, write halfway interesting blog posts, and knowing a thing or two about web design definitely doesn’t hurt. If you own a business and you’re not the one handling these things, then you must be paying someone, or you must have all the business you can stand.
That’s what I’m in the middle of right now. The website. If you visit it frequently enough, you will notice that something changes every few days. That’s me. Something I thought would work doesn’t, and so I rewrite it, rearrange it, or just delete it. It’s got me a little batty now that Spring is right around the corner. Thankfully, I do have a bit of help. Tim Young (he had a farm out in Elberton for a while but sold it when it got so big that he didn’t want to expand any further) started this thing called Small Farm Nation. I am so thankful to be able to do most of it myself and that Tim has developed this program with the modern small farmer in mind.
Having a background in marketing, he started a service for farmers to teach them how to market themselves and how to develop their own website with a WordPress template he developed. It would be totally worth your while to check it out.
So you’re not a farmer but you need some web and or blog help for your online business? Then you should check out My friend Teresa Ott at A Fearless Venture. She offers a variety of services to make life better. I just hope neither Tim nor Teresa cringe too much should they read this.
Time to milk the cows!
