The most spectacular manifestation of the curse (any accountants reading this, please cover your ears) ended in us using only paper and Excel old school ledgers for business accounting (my grandfather would be proud). Do we know that online systems exist? Are there 500 courses a year to help farmers get set up in Quick Books? Did we actually spend a lot of money with a consultant years ago to do just that? Sure we do/did. My tech curse power is SO STRONG that somehow our teeny tiny farm’s data on Quick Books Online intermingled with data from a multi-million dollar company in Florida. Before the QB corporate office had to actually shut down our account to entirely rewrite code for THREE WEEKS, they spent a full week trying to convince me that I did in fact have a business in Florida with seven employees and fourteen credit cards (all of who I had full access to at that time) that I must have somehow forgotten about. Even with the re-coding, Quick Books never worked quite right again for us. Which is unfortunate, because in the world today, using every tool you can to be effective at managing, communicating, and selling online is super important, even if we only focused on our very in-person, connected with our customer/community product.Most farms our size do our own web design, ecommerce, accounting, bookkeeping, marketing, graphic design, social media, emailing, and so on. On one hand, it’s kind of fun to get to do so many different things—I actually love getting to play with graphics and work on the website.But on the other hand, when the curse strikes, everything gets so frustrating that it makes me yearn for the days of the good old hand drawn CSA brochures and Microsoft Publisher!
Technology is Hard (and other Hartwood Farm curses)… — Hartwood Farm
