Oh the first week of March. What a time. There always seems to be such a strong sense of optimism in the air at the beginning of March. I am sure it is just the promise of spring, but it means a lot more than that to me.
You see the first week of March is the week that I broke ground on the farm 15 years ago in 2003. It is hard to believe that 15 years have gone so quickly. But in the end, calendars don’t lie and neither do the gray hairs in my beard.
So here we are a decade and a half later and I have to say that I hope we are just getting started. Running a farm and a business can often feel like a sausage grinder, but I love it. The fiery emotions that I brought to the food movement as a 27 year old idealist have grown and transformed into a 42 year old passionate realist with a very clear vision of where our regional food industry needs to be.
The recipe is pretty simple, executing the recipe will always the challenge. You see as the Amazons of the food world continue to consolidate producers to gain logistical efficiencies, we have to find the disenfranchised small producers and come together as one team. No one farm will have the diversity or capacity to play ball with the big boys and girls. In this food space that we are in right now, it will come down to collaborate or go away.
I saw this coming as soon as Amazon bought Whole Foods last June. Amazon and Walmart are in a battle and Whole Foods is just a pawn in their game. So instead of playing in this game, we have to remove ourselves from it and reinvent how small farms/producers can bring their goods to market. And for us, that is naturally through home delivery and not by building up brick and mortar stores. We can compete with the large box stores in cyberspace, but we cannot in the streets.
So since June, I have been hitting the pavement looking for more partners to add diversity and depth to our offering. Strength in numbers and as a herd. So we have partnered with more growers in New Mexico, more in Arizona, and a bunch more in Colorado. Our team of suppliers is stronger than I have ever seen. And just getting better each month honestly.
And so with this confidence in our partners, in our crew, and in our mission, we are excited to announce that we will be adding Denver to the communities that we serve beginning March 22nd. This will connect our customers and producers from the Las Cruces/El Paso areas all along the I-25 corridor north to Denver.
Connecting our partners along this corridor will allow for fresh local foods to move easily from the farms/ranches to you. Both states bring so much to the table in building a more diverse and year-round regional food model that this integration is actually long overdue.
We will launch this expansion the first week of Spring and I think that you will be very happy with the quality and diversity that we have brought together. If you have any thoughts or questions, please do not hesitate to email me,
Now on to the web site. You will see a few changes to the web site categories. We have been getting some confusion from folks that our categories were not very intuitive to navigate. So we wanted to try something new.
Look for more categories on the web site (since those are easy to find and click on) but with fewer items per category so that you will not get lost in a maze of scrolling through pages. We tried to keep all categories to just one page of products. Personally I find it a lot easier and hope you will too. Thanks for your feedback on how to make the shopping experience easier and more seamless.
Lastly, I would like to end this birthday week by saying thank you so much for the support that you have given us over the last 15 years. It is very humbling to know that our communities continue to support our mission week after week. I do not take this support for granted. Knowing that we have so many people and families who want us to succeed keeps getting me out of bed every morning to be able to do what we do better. I am a grateful dude this week.
Cheers to many more years, Farmer Monte