 I'm Erin Kaufman. I'm the market manager for the Durham Farmers Market in downtown Durham, North Carolina. The Durham Farmers Market is pretty large, all local and producer-only farmers market. We're open on Saturday mornings, year-round, and Wednesday afternoons during the spring and summer time. We have 71 total vendors at the Durham Farmers Market. About 75% of the vendors are farmers and their products range from vegetables and fruits, meats, eggs, cheeses. We have two different farmers that just grow mushrooms. In the meat category, there's chicken, pork, beef, the usual, but then we also have farmers that raise buffalo and duck and quail and rabbit and all kinds of things. The farmers who sell the farmers market are constantly trying to expand the range of products that they can raise and grow within 70 miles of Durham. The other 25% of our vendors are crafters and prepared food, and that 25% really runs the gamut. We have bakers and pasta makers and people who make nut butter and pickles and preserves and Persian food, all kinds of stuff, and we also have some true crafters, artisans, people who make pottery and do other art-type crafts. On a typical Saturday, we have about 2,500 to 3,500 customers. On a typical Wednesday, we'll see anywhere between 800 and 1,000 people coming down to the Wednesday market. It's a pretty big operation. We have a lot of customers and people who live in Durham who are really excited about local food and shopping local. We're located in Durham Central Park, which is about a five-acre green space in the middle of downtown Durham, and we're in a pavilion, so half of our vendors or most of our vendors are underneath the pavilion, but in the summertime when everything is really big, the farmers market just kind of goes all the way around the park. It's pretty exciting. It's pretty cool how big it is. So the Durham Farmers Market is an all-local and producer-only farmers market, and that means that everything that is available at the Durham Farmers Market is grown, raised, produced, or made within 70 miles of Durham, and producer-only means that the people who are selling you the food and selling you the products are the people that made or grew or raised the products. What's available at the Durham Farmers Market is a reflection of what can be grown and raised within 70 miles of Durham. As the market manager, I do kind of a little bit of everything. I'm responsible for the market day operations, making sure that all the farmers and vendors know where to set up, that they get set up in a timely manner and in an organized manner. I organize all of the events that happen at the farmers market, so when we have cooking demonstrations or cooking classes or tastings or even the music that's at the market, I do all the coordination for that kind of stuff. And other things that I do during the market, you know, I look out for safety and just make sure that everything is running very smoothly, so that the farmers and vendors who are coming there to be face-to-face with their customers don't have to think about the logistics of anything. They just come, sell, and are able to make their money. We have a couple of staff members. We have an assistant market manager, so she and I coordinate what she does. We're just about to start accepting SNAP benefits, which is food stamps. We have a woman who is coordinating that program, so she and I are working out all the logistics of that. I do things like keep records to deposit money, order t-shirts, coordinate events, clean the bathrooms. Whatever needs to be done to operate the business, it mostly falls on me. We have a board of directors that is actually responsible for setting policy and kind of the overarching parts of the market, but I kind of do the little day-to-day things. What I enjoy the most about my job is that there's always new challenges and there's always things that are changing and developing, and so it's challenging in a way that I really like because I'm constantly getting to figure out new things and try new things and get new skills. It's not like I sit and do the same thing every day. Plus, I don't have to sit in an office every day. Two days of the week, I get to be at market and walk around and interact with really interesting people. I think that one of the most challenging parts of my job is dealing with all kinds of different personalities and making sure that everything is dealt with in a really professional customer service-oriented way so that everybody feels heard and feels valued. At the same time, that's kind of one of the more rewarding parts of my job when I can do that really well. I have a bachelor's degree from Guilford College in Environmental Studies and Geology, and while that's not really related to farming at all, I have a lot of experience working on farms and understanding the life of a farmer. I didn't really have any training before I got this job. I started working at the farmer's market when I was 23 or 24, and my previous jobs had been working on farms in the summertime. I was a waitress one summer in college, that kind of stuff, but the first year out of school, I co-managed one of the farms that I had worked on when I was in high school, so I really got to dig in and manage all the different aspects of the farm. And so I think that that really helped me learn how to juggle all kinds of different things at the same time. When I was in college, I was the president of the bowling league, and I was the general manager of the radio station. Those two things, I feel like, were really, really helpful in gaining the skills to manage volunteers and coordinate. Largish organizations that are large, but a little bit unstructured, but do have structure. I feel like when I interviewed for the job, I was like, yeah, I managed my college radio station, and I did all this. And it was kind of all very relevant to the tasks that they were looking for. And also, I had a truck. That was a question. But that's not really why I got my job. But my job started out with a pretty narrow scope, and the longer that I've been, the manager of the farmers market, I've been there for eight years. It's really kind of grown and changed, and I've gotten to shape it into the job that it is now, just based on kind of years of experience and getting to understand more and better how the market operates and what their needs are. I've learned a lot. It's pretty exciting. Another thing that I think really helped me with getting my job is the school that I went to was a liberal arts college that was really writing intensive, and it was also pretty unstructured. And so I kind of learned how to self-direct and get things done without a lot of direction, without a lot of structure. And I think that that really serves me well because I can kind of look at the big picture and see what needs to be done and kind of make myself do it because I learned those skills in college. For students who might be interested in a similar career to mine, I think the best thing that you can do is when you're starting out, when you're in high school, when you're in college, find jobs that you really are interested in, even if they don't pay you very well, and try and gain as many skills as you can, because I never thought that I would be the manager of a farmers market and I never thought that I would have this job for eight years, but I feel like I picked up a lot of skills along the way. I never had a really well-paying job when I was younger, but I learned so much that I can apply in my job right now. And it was because I did things that really fascinated me. I worked on farms, I worked with animals, I worked with plants, because that was really interesting to me.