It wasn’t just me. Strangers would see Brian wearing his LoLa tee at Target and ask if he’d clicked that day. And our blog, previously read only by the chicken-obsessed and Jason’s mother, was now getting views by way of Texas and California and Florida as hundreds and, later, thousands of people followed the contest link to our website.
From the comments people were dropping in digital space, it didn’t feel like this was about just one small farm in northern Minnesota. I had the sense they were voting daily for a whole new food system or at least curious about alternatives to the one we have. Perhaps they could envision a country with more farmers acting as true stewards of livestock and the land, farm families that can afford health insurance, orthodontia, and even that one Disney World excursion per the American Dream. Or maybe our cheeky name just made them snort. Either way, it was good.
A few weeks later, Jason found me tucked into our basement, writing my thesis. I could hear his obnoxious rock music ringtone accompanied by heavy steps. When I looked up, the cell phone was thrust in my face and he was pointing out the caller ID. It read Mountain View, California, the corporate home of Intuit. We giggled and put our heads close together so we could both hear the phone conversation.
Now it’s one thing to say, “Imagine if our message of hens on pasture was on a national stage.” It’s quite another to be waiting, weak-kneed, in the wings when—holy Gallus gallus domesticus—LoLa made it to the Small Business Big Game Top Twenty.
I’d both craved and cursed the bright spotlight that was to be cast on Locally Laid. It was great for the business and even better for agriculture of the middle, but I was convinced that I’d say something stupid with my quirky sense of humor and offend swaths of folks. But fears or not, it was happening. I cranked out press releases before work and managed to land more television, this time coaxing a Twin Cities reporter 150 miles north to do a story. Our hometown newspaper gave it a column inch and a half, just below a story on the naming of the new monkeys at the zoo; the daily was likely sick of my fervent public relations campaigns.
In early November 2013, we got a call from Steve, an advance scout from Intuit. He was coming to find suitable locations for a professional photo shoot, which the company wanted of all the top twenty finalists. He’d need to see the farm and, of course, our office. He needed it the next day.
Hanging up, I looked from the couch, where worn throws were arranged like shootout victims, to Jason’s desk encircled with a five-foot radius of paper splash. There was nothing I could do to make this look like the operational headquarters of a Super Bowl ad–worthy business. With the job, the thesis, the farm, the family, and now this contest, I’ll admit we hadn’t been winning any Good Housekeeping awards.
I knew what I needed to do: tumble-roll into Operation Create an Office, flipping our currently unrented basement apartment (walk-in junk drawer) into a contemporary workspace in under twenty-four hours. This included an emergency trip for throw pillows (in our company colors of orange and blue), new towels and cute soap for the adjacent bathroom, and pencil cups and all things office-y. Like a file cabinet.
There were some sizable bruises on my legs from hauling furniture around our house to fill the space. For our bare walls, our friends at our local UPS store bailed us out again. Beth and Jay took one of our farm photos and cranked out a gallery-wrapped canvas—on a Sunday.
Just as I finished hanging the huge chicken portrait, our UPS friend walked out the back door as Jason and the Intuit rep were walking in the front. I knew this because Milo was hollering, “Mother Bird has landed! I repeat, MOTHER BIRD has landed!”
Jason gawked around the new office like a tourist as I willed him to stop looking so bedazzled.
Steve, a young guy with a kind smile, gave the office a quick nod of approval and calmly explained what would happen next. Intuit representatives would be flying in the next day for the photo session, and these images would be later used for “marketing purposes.” After a pleasant twenty minutes, he was gone.
Later, he texted us saying the Intuit folks wanted to go see the chickens before coming to the office.
We tossed in bed that night.
“Do you think it’s like a job interview? Checking to see if we can handle making the next round?” Jason asked in the dark. Despite the voting, the software giant had the final say in which companies advanced to the final.
“That makes some sense. I’m sure they don’t want to accidentally crush a small business with too much hype,” I answered.
“We’re pretty damn small,” Jason said.
“Yeah, but we have office art.”
The next day, we awoke to cold, intermittent fall showers—and spitting snow. I left Glensheen early to gather up the children from school to head out to Wrenshall, past the population sign that read 308.
The pasture where our coops sit was heavy with clay, and when clay gets wet it turns into an especially hellish kind of sludge. It’s dangerously slippery and really kicks up those natural farm smells. I hadn’t worn my muck boots because I’d come directly from the mansion and it was just a few pictures, right? How long could this take? I quickly regretted it. Today’s mud was the kind that would suck off a shoe and never return it.
Then we waited … and kept waiting. Minutes turned into hours and we jogged to keep warm. We pulled on every piece of castoff work clothing we kept in the farm shed. Still, the children were cold. I dug around until I found some cardboard to cover my vehicle’s floorboards and entertained them in the car by taking silly selfies and singing to the radio, over the drone of the heater.
Finally, in my rearview mirror, I saw what looked like an entourage coming down the dirt road. I turned around to take in a big black Escalade, a Prius, a couple of sedans, and—a limo? Yes, Locally Laid was seeing its first limousine. Apparently, the crew had been staging at the Wrenshall convenience store. (I don’t think they bought their cover story that they were filming a hunting video.)
When I say crew, I mean camera crew. Five or six men and women with hefty gear tumbled out, along with someone wielding an enormous boom mic. There were also really beautifully dressed Californians wearing brand-new rain boots. A few even wore bright red rain ponchos, still sporting the fold creases from the packaging. (The camera crew had no boots, and I’m pretty sure all of them had to throw out their sneakers after the event.)
And hey, isn’t that the guy with the good teeth from TV? Yes, Bill Rancic, who won Donald Trump’s first season of The Apprentice, was there. We hadn’t really gotten into that show, but because of Milo’s obsession with business, we’d watched that first season. A couple of years back Milo had dressed as Donald Trump for Halloween. He’d spent six months growing out his hair to make an enormous Trump-like comb-over. On the field that day, Milo tugged my sleeve, wanting me to ask Bill if he’d ever peed in Trump’s gold toilet. I gave him a slight back-and-forth with my chin; I just couldn’t ask. Honestly, I barely had the presence to form any words, and I was pretty sure pee and gold toilet weren’t going to be among them.
Within seconds, we were ushered out to pasture, still wearing all our mix-matched clothes for warmth. Before we could grasp what was going on, a huge congratulatory banner was unfurled and every camera was trained on us for reaction. And we blinked, we stared, and then, one more blink.
Stunned and cold, we made terrible television. Even though they were telling us we were in the top four and I could actually read on the banner that we were in the top four, it just didn’t make sense. I mean, we’re us—a small farm in Wrenshall. We sold our first egg barely a year ago and were struggling to just make it work day to day. It was all I could do to not holler, “The office is fake! We didn’t own a real file cabinet until yesterday! It’s all a sham!”
Soon Bill was asking us questions, interviewer style, and the boom mic hovered over our heads as our reluctant lips remembered what to do. He asked about our farm-to-store model, our difficulties raising capital. I may have confessed to the whole
world that I recently signed away my entire retirement fund, and that now every last dime we had was in the farm. I’m pretty sure I talked about how if we won this commercial, during the most-watched televised event in the United States, we’d be taking Real Food out of some tucked-away section of your grocery and giving it the same stage as a Frito-Lay corn chip. Or a Dorito. Surely I’d offended a good number of people with that statement.
Then I saw Jason lead Bill and the camera crew over the solar fencing and inside a hoop coop. And while I was involved in polite conversation with some of our guests, I was distracted with what Jason was up to. He looked to be holding a chicken backward, football style, and from my peripheral vision I swear I could see him showing Bill, a beautiful and manicured man, how to assess a hen’s fertility. I blinked, but the image of the reality TV star on our muddy, smelly pasture with his fingers on our bird’s back end evaluating her pelvic bone remained. It was a Salvador Dali painting come to life.
I was nervous talking to the Intuit communication and marketing department members. They were holding hens with gusto and politely not mentioning the wafting odor: a combo featuring part bird, part manure over the sulfurous bloom of waterlogged clay soil. I turned just as one particularly well-dressed gentleman took a huge digger, like a cartoon; both feet went out from under him.
My mind was screaming, Californian down! but he piped up with an affable “I’m okay!”
Poor guy, I hoped he had a good dry cleaner for that gorgeous wool coat.
Oh, and as a side note: they never came to the office.
Chapter 19
Does waking at 2:45 a.m. qualify as getting up early or just sleeping poorly? I hadn’t been setting an alarm during those blurry days of the commercial contest; rather, I’d been letting the tendrils of loose ends drag me out of my warm bed.
But what had popped open my eyes that particular early morning was an excitement hangover. My cell phone had started ringing early the day before at work, then nonstop with people clamoring to tell me that LoLa had a celebrity tweeting.
“Michael Pollan?” I’d said flatly into my cell from my workplace’s standing desk, taking in Glensheen’s view of snowy trails and bridges down to Lake Superior. “The one with the food book empire? The movie Food, Inc.? Who hangs with farm god Joel Salatin?” I noisily pelted down the stairs of the carriage house office to the communal printer, where my latest script for the mansion’s Christmas tour waited for me. Pinching a vulnerable mint from a co-worker’s candy dish, I went on, “You’re telling me that Michael tweeted about our farm … in Wrenshall? Can I call him Mike now? Does this mean we’re friends? … No, I’m not mocking you, I’m mocking my own crazed existence.”
My brain rejected this information, even when I went online and saw the less than 140 characters for myself. I mean, this is akin to having a big star, someone whose work you really admire—say, Jesus Christ—single you out of a baseball stadium full of fans and give you the nod, saying, “Hey, nice work.”
To keep the excitement up, we planned a series of new videos. One of these clips had Jason speeding up the prairie on the four-wheeler, just as the gorgeous pink of predawn illuminated the chickens on pasture. Jason was honking the vehicle’s tinny horn and then leapt out with a bullhorn shouting: “LoLa, big news! We’re one step closer to the Super Bowl!” A couple dozen takes later, he got it.
Another featured a chicken “driving” our van, swerving down an empty country road, chased by police. She was pulled over for “tweeting and driving” about the Big Game. The Duluth Police Department was both generous and good sports, giving this silly clip all they had.
The new videos gave something fresh to be shared on social media and, I thought, would allow needed television B-roll, those images that flash onscreen while a reporter talks over it, for news reports. They could cover the story without having to trek out to the farm.
It was working.
I’m not sure if there’s a technical definition of groundswell, but Duluth, during those three months, wowed us with its buildup. It was like watching a movie montage as the scrappy misfit underdogs gave it all they had against their well-favored rivals.
As Abbie and I drove through the commercial business area, we started to see the marquees. These signs, the ones with the changeable letters at theaters and car washes, even the big regional mall, now read VoteLoLa.com, listing the website Matt had cleverly set up for the online voting. A little bubble of something—Joy? Astonishment?—formed in my chest as we counted out over a dozen of these signs. Considering all those pitiful times on the prairie, this turnaround was stunning.
“Mom, you aren’t crying, are you?” asked Abbie, a bit of tease in her voice.
I smiled through tears.
And these signs were just part of it. Thousands of small bookmark-sized notices about the contest were printed at cost, again by our UPS friends, then hot-glued onto takeout boxes from a half-dozen pizzerias. They were also placed in hotel rooms and given out with restaurant checks and grocery store receipts all over the city. Homemade signs popped up in storefronts, free ads blinked on websites, and lawn signs sprang up all over town. When we had a Get Out the Click rally, some twenty-five people stood with us on a bitterly cold morning to dance with signs for commuters. Curt, our business coach, even showed up in a chicken suit.
The VoteLoLa siege exploded online. Dozens of people changed their Facebook profile picture to our VoteLoLa.com graphic, and the social media giants at aimClear, when not busy with their own big-name clients, helped us gratis to scare up traffic online. A friend of our friend Linda donated a digital billboard—a freaking BILLBOARD. Our girl Whitney would gladly “Peep Your Ride,” painting our logo and website on your rear windshield. Even the Duluth News Tribune, the paper that had once reported the competition in two sentences below the monkey-naming story, now thought it was front page news. Then they gave us a free print ad.
I set up a stint of television interviews for Jason in the Twin Cities, which he did while Brian farmed and I showed my face at work. Streaming some of the newscasts online, I watched Jason explain how by sourcing and selling locally we were strengthening rural economies. Then the reporter queried him about the ad agency that handled our creative. “Oh,” Jason responded. “That’s just a middle-aged woman in her jammies at five in the morning—my wife, Lucie!”
I shook my head, smiling and swearing simultaneously.
Later the marketing folks at Intuit would ask us what happened. Not about Jason’s foot in mouth, but about our explosion of community. They hadn’t seen any of the other regions get riled up quite the same way. It was hard to explain to people in prosperous and warm California, but I think Duluth saw in our little startup a mini version of themselves. The classic tortoise-not-favored-to-win story.
Our little port city is probably best known for three things: undisputed beauty, being slapped across the weather map with inclement conditions, and its postindustrial economic apocalypse. In the 1980s, it once sported the billboard, “Will the last one leaving Duluth please turn out the light?”
I can only guess that this community saw something to rally around. And it was a chicken.
While our region clicked their love, the daily vote I was most touched by was the one jointly cast in Maine. My mother’s dial-up Internet couldn’t handle the graphics-heavy Intuit site, so my octogenarian father drove her the mile to the Winslow Public Library—every single day. There she fulfilled her daily e-ballot on the public terminals. My father didn’t vote himself, but this didn’t bother me. He’s not a computer guy. But his ensuring that my mother got there was a much-appreciated act of support.
And we needed that support.
For me, it wasn’t so much about winning the commercial. Don’t get me wrong, that’s big, huge. But I was far more interested in the media around the winning of the TV spot, the dozens of national television, radio, and print outlets that would interview us the morning after it aired. The idea of sitting on the Today show
couch in front of busy Americans wearing hot rollers or running on basement treadmills, asking them to question, for just one moment, where their food comes from, well, it nearly stopped my heart. Even if some minuscule percentage of mainstream America, for the first time, asked their grocery managers to source local products, then everything we had gone through and indeed were going through had reason.
I understood that lofty goals required sacrifice. Earlier in the week, I’d walked into the house with takeout food and saw cereal and snack food boxes littering our countertops along with an assortment of dirty Fiestaware. All the pressure and clutter worked on me, and I know because I was losing track of important items. My natural reaction to stress is to emulate a shaken soda bottle, bursting forth all objects of value across my scattered world—my wallet with credit cards and driver’s license, my favorite bra, and all matching socks. Even Jason, for the first time in his life, mislaid a set of car keys. That he was out of town, requiring a tow truck, only added to the excitement.
Fortunately, we had guidance. Once a week before work, a small group of community leaders and businesspeople gathered around a conference table to talk contest strategy. These busy folks freely gave their time and talent and abused all their personal connections on Locally Laid’s behalf. Truly, it pained me.
I carried an oversized feeling of indebtedness and, like a kid with too much candy, it felt like an overindulgence of too much nice. I had a bellyache from all that sweet. After our last meeting, as everyone scurried off late because of us, it hit me exactly how much people were doing. All that generosity and faith spiraled in my head and chest and I realized that, more than anything, I owed them victory. Not just for them but for this city, this region, the whole dang agricultural movement.
Locally Laid Page 17
