We hit one of those unexpected milestones at our on-farm market recently. While doing paperwork on one of our newest hires, I noticed that she was born a couple weeks after Ferndale Market opened in 2008. It’s hard for me to believe that our market has now been around 17 years, longer than most teenagers. Our little baby is growing up!

On one hand, it feels like just yesterday when we opened our doors for the first time. Then again, an awful lot has changed since those early days. We were a lean and mean retail team, with me, my wife, and my parents covering a good chunk of the initial store hours. We were initially open only five days a week, and I remember reading the newspaper during slow periods. I’m reluctant to share that with our current staff, because now there’s always so much to do!

I have great memories from those early years from the pop-in visits from our fellow local farmers. Catching up with our early pork farmer about recent bike rides, or our egg farmer about the ups-and-downs of poultry. Despite the slow periods, I remember plenty of commotion, in part because we only had one phone line, so our wholesale customers called the on-farm market to place an order. I could be ringing up a purchase, while also trying to scribble an order from St. Olaf College.

Now we can barcode scan many of our items, but our initial system required that we type a search for each item. It helped my keyboarding skills, but sure didn’t speed up the check-out process. And, many of you probably remember that the early market space had a kitchen in the front. We held a lot of cooking events in that space, namely our always-popular Thanksgiving turkey class, but we eventually wised up to a much better flow by removing the kitchen.

Yes, we’ve come a long way, and it’s fun to look back on our 17-year-old on-farm market. All the real highlights have been the people who have made it all work: our team, our local food partners, and our customers. Thanks for helping us do this together!