Beginning Farmer: Websites and Beef Boxes

As I write this I have spent over six hours on Shopify, trying to upload bundle boxes and figure out pricing structure. I was going through adding all the meat bundles, I was thinking "most people don't even know all that goes into this." So I decided to show you a little of the back-end of marketing our meat.

I don't want to be all doom and gloom though.  I love the lifestyle I get to lead, getting my kids outside and knowing the care that went into where my food came from.  But to be real with you, farming isn't anything like I imagined it would be.  I want to give you guys an inside look at what goes into selling our meat. 

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We will start after we send our steer to the butcher.

Step 1: decide which cuts we'd like and what will sell

Step 2: we still have to figure out how to get sausage and jerky made, but that's a future problem

Step 3: pick up and store an entire steer in our freezers, where we still have turkeys and chickens taking up room

Step 4: inventory the meat, weighing each one, writing it down, and putting our label on it.

Step 5: organizing the meat, ensuring we can find the different cuts later on.

Step 6: take pictures of all the meat for marketing purposes

Step 7: Design a thumbnail picture for the website and any other pertinent marketing banners for social media

Step 8: Create a product page on Shopify, specifying the items, weights, and other unique characteristics of each individual item.

Step 9: Write the descriptor for what makes that cut of meat flavorful

Step 10: Blast out to social media on a specific day, in a specific order to try to keep things organized.

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Added Thoughts

Involved in these steps are not even the fact of making the webpage in the beginning, the content calendar made a month in advanced, the tutorials I've read on how to set up shipping and farm pickup, the competition I've studied to ensure we are on target with pricing and offerings, the farmers markets we sell out of, the messages/emails I answer, and the amount of decisions and conversations we have before even getting to this point.  

I honestly thrive on this kind of work.  My type 5 self absolutely loves learning and gaining more knowledge, constantly trying to become better and implementing new exciting things for you.  So I never want this to be a pity party, but I do have many people who romanticize farm life and I probably did too before actually farming.  So I just want to help give you some inside knowledge on the parts of farming that I didn't even know existed.