My husband, Peter, and I have always felt it vital that we open up our farm doors to the outside world. Transparency—in food especially—is an important element of building trust.
If you’re a big food conglomerate, you spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing to curate an image designed to establish trust. If you’re a small mom & pop operation like us, you open your doors and invite your customers in.
Over the years, this “open door” policy has taken lots of forms, including writing this column for Mohawk Valley Living. We’ve hosted Meet the Lambs & Kids events over winter break; we’ve thrown Mother’s Day in the Barn and Father’s Day Picnics; and we’ve regularly hosted tours and tastings for groups like Hamilton College’s Slow Food. Several years ago, we helped create and continue to be active members of the CNY Cheese Trail. On occasion, we’ve offered classes on how to break down a whole chicken or stretch your own mozzarella. And we’ve built our farm store with large windows that look into the make room of our cheese plant, ensuring that visitors get a front row view of all that goes on there. In other words, keeping an open door policy means some work on our part but we believe is worth the extra effort.
Every once in awhile, we get a request from someone that wants to film our operation, interview us, and produce a piece that will go out into the world—for a potentially much wider audience. Long-time restaurant customer and good friends Tailor & the Cook did just that this past summer, releasing a series of farm-to-table vignettes on many of their local suppliers.*
More recently, we were contacted by the producers of From Scratch**, a reality TV show created by and starring actor David Moscow. About to enter its fifth season, this series takes a close look at the ingredients (and their producers) that make up various dishes. Each show begins with David meeting a chef, tasting a dish, and then setting out to learn how each ingredient is grown, harvested, caught, bottled, etc.
For an upcoming episode on the ultimate New York bagel, David and his crew came to Jones Family Farm to learn how we make cream cheese. They spent an entire morning with us, first visiting a neighbor’s farm to pick up milk and feed calves. We then showed them how we transport the milk, pour it into the vat pasteurizer, drain the curd, and ultimately salt and pack the finished cream cheese. To his credit, David rolled up his sleeves and carried 100-pound cans of milk, filled draining bags, and salted cheese before taking a break and tasting the end product.
In a world that can seem very removed from agriculture and food production in general, I appreciate this series’ approach. And as a farmer/producer myself, I am fascinated by the people who feed us, their labor, and their stories. The episode featuring a 10,000-head camel dairy, in particular, blew me away!
Yes, it can be a little nerve wracking inviting the public onto our farm and allowing them to see and experience it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly. And when it comes to allowing outsiders to film our process, it was particularly scary ceding editorial control. But to all my fellow farmers and producers out there, I think the act of opening your doors—and the transparency and trust it creates—is rewarding beyond words.
*Check out the Tailor & the Cook’s video series at https://www.tailorandthecook.com/videos
**All four seasons of From Scratch can be watched for free on Philo.com or with paid subscriptions on Amazon Prime and YouTube.