CSA Newsletter for June 15, 2014

Farm Update

The very first drop-off of the season, last Monday in Alma.

Hi everyone!  Well, the first week of drop-offs went really well, and now we are officially entering the busiest weeks of the season.  Usually the second half of June is about as crazy as it's going to get, and it tapers off gradually throughout July.  We also finally got some really good rain, and it is amazing how everything at the farm perked right back up.  We also planted the strawberry plants this week that will start bearing fruit next year.  Speaking of strawberries, we started harvesting them Friday, and everyone will be getting some in the shares this week.  We also had some bad news; our neighbor's dog killed about a dozen of our chickens a few days ago, so we won't have quite as many eggs until we can get some new chickens to replace the ones we lost.  But on the upside, our field crew is back together again!  Charlie just got back from his trip to Zambia, so we'll be starting out this week with all of our guys, which will make all the craziness of the next few weeks a little less crazy.  

What to Expect in Your Share This Week

• Choice of bok choy or kale

  

  We don't have blueberries this week, but they are starting to ripen,
  so it will be soon!

• Strawberries
• Choice of broccoli or spinach
• Choice of radishes or green onions
• Choice of salad mix or head lettuce
• Choice of Kohlrabi or dill
• Choice of garlic scapes, frisee, or chard

Fruit and Veggie Spotlight:  Strawberries

          Strawberries are not around for very long during the season, but when they are, they are one of the best tasting fruits of the season. The strawberry has been cultivated and eaten for centuries in both Europe and the Americas well before Columbus.  However, it was in Bretagne, France in that the modern day strawberry was born in the 1750s by breeding North American and European varieties.  This yielded larger fruit, as most of the berries before more closely resembled the small berries often seen in wild pasture areas.  We are really glad to be growing them in this day and age, because we can't imagine picking all of those pea-sized berries!

          The strawberries we have here at the farm start their lives as dormant plants shipped to us from another grower in Dowagiac, MI. We plant them in the spring and they grow for a full season with no fruit being harvested the first year.  This first year, they produce a few little fruits but the focus is on developing the plant’s vegetative growth for the next year.  As the plants get into their dormant period towards the fall, we spread straw over the plants to ensure better winter survival.  In the spring, as the plants begin to come back, we push this straw back and it acts like a mulch around the plant.  This mulch helps the berries stay cleaner later in the season.  Then a few weeks after pushing the straw back, the plants get flower clusters and the fruit begins to develop, ripening sometime in June.  There are many risks to strawberry production here in Michigan.  Last year we lost half of our fruit because of a late frost that killed many of the developing flowers.  Also, heavy rains during the harvest period can cause berries to rot or lose quality in other ways.  However, this year seems to be shaping up to be a good strawberry season for us, and we are very excited to get our first fruits of the season here at the farm.  This last Friday we started picking some and they are fantastic! We hope you enjoy them as well!

Recipes

Strawberry salsa!  I can't wait to try this!

Just in case you're at a loss to do with the strawberries in your share this week, here are 10 Surprising Things to Do with Strawberries, courtesy of Better Homes and Gardens.  

Frisee Salad with Dijon Vinaigrette

Also, last week at the drop-off, one of the most common questions I was asked is "What do you do with frisee?"  So here is a delicious recipe for Frisee Salad with Dijon Vinaigrette.  It calls for chives, but you can use your green onions instead.  Enjoy!

CSA Newsletter for June 7, 2014

Farm Update

During this dry weather, we irrigate
 our plants using a drip line system.
  Little perforated hoses run along
the base of the plants, putting water
only where it is needed.  This saves
water, and also keeps the plants'
foliage dry, which helps prevent
plant diseases.

Hello everyone!  The CSA is officially kicking off this week, and we really look forward to seeing you at the drop-offs, and meeting you for the first time if you're a newbie!  Things at the farm are coming along; the dry weather has caused most of the veggies to grow more slowly than we'd like, but we've been irrigating a lot so they're still hanging in there.  We've had a little more insect pressure than usual too, also due to the lack of rain.  When everything gets dry, the bugs start looking around for the juiciest things they can find, and right now, that happens to be our veggies because we've been irrigating so much.  But the upside is that there have been virtually no plant diseases trying to take hold in the field, because plant diseases thrive in moist weather.  So you win some, you lose some.  Fred has also been planting a lot this week.  He and the field crew put in 3,000 sweet potato plants on Thursday, and they have been really pushing to get everything in the ground before we get really busy next week.  The orchard is also coming along really well.  We've also gotten a few loose ends tied up; our cultivator is back up and running, and we've finally gotten our new well in the blueberry patch!  That made me breath a huge sigh of relief, because it means that no amount of dry weather can mess up our wonderful blueberries, which was a huge disappointment last year.  But this year we are ready to roll, and especially ready to get the CSA started!

What to Expect in Your Share This Week

We'll have lots of gorgeous head lettuce 
in the shares this week, including red 
head lettuce like this, and also some green 
head lettuce.

Here are your choices in this week's share!  If you have a half share, you'll choose one in each group, and if you have a full share, you'll choose two in each group.  If you're unfamiliar with something in the share, just click on the name to see a picture of it.  Also, we'll have some recipes below that feature these spring veggies!

• Bok choy or cooking greens mix
• Spinach or Swiss chard
• Napa cabbage or frisee
• Salad mix or head lettuce
• Kale
• Green onions
• Cilantro, baby leeks, or a surprise veggie

The Best Way to Store your Spring Produce so it Will Last a Really Long Time

The most common question I get asked at CSA drop-offs (aside from "So what exactly do you do with kohlrabi?") is "How do I make this last a while?"  So here is your guide to answer exactly that question, so all of your veggies will last long past when you thought you'd be throwing them on the compost pile.

The first rule of thumb with all of the lovely leafy goodness that spring gives us is to keep it wrapped up, preferably in the bag it came in (in the case of salad mix, cooking greens, or spinach), or in a grocery bag.  Leafy things have a tendency to get wilted really quickly if they are left uncovered in the refrigerator.  And that brings me to the next point:  Put them in the refrigerator, not on the counter.  There are a lot of late summer items (such as tomatoes and peppers) that are better left out at room temperature, but the green leafy veggies are not in that category.  They are best kept cool.

Also in this week's share will be some
of this great bok choy!  If you're not
sure how to prepare it when you get
it home, check out the recipe
suggestions below!

Another thing to know is that you should be cautious about rewashing your salad mix.  Once a CSA member asked me how to store it so it would last longer, because hers started to go bad less than a week after the drop-off.  That really surprised me, because I've known ours to still look really good three weeks later.  After asking her more about it, we figured out that it was because she was rewashing it once she got it home, and the moisture was getting trapped in the bag.  Legally we can't call our salad mix pre-washed because we don't have a licensed processing facility.  But I can tell you this: we rinse it really thoroughly several times at the farm, and when we bring bags of it home, we eat it straight out of the bag without rewashing it.  Hopefully that will save you some time, and also help your salad mix last longer!

Besides that, the only other thing that you'll want to know is about the bok choy.  Both the stem and the leaves are great to eat, and if you think you're going to have it for a while, it's a good idea to separate the leaves from the stem.  If you use it up within a week or so, then don't worry about separating them; they'll be just fine and delicious the way they are.  But if it gets to be more than a week after you got it, it's a good idea to remove the leaves, because that helps the stems stay good for way longer.

I hope this helps!  If you ever run into something that's not lasting very long once you get it home, let me know, and we'll see if there is a better way you could store it to make it last longer.  Chances are, it will already last a lot longer than veggies you get at the grocery store since most things you get in your CSA share are harvested the very same day, whereas veggies you get at the store have usually been out of the field for more than a week.  We want you to get the most use possible out of all your veggie goodness, and this should help!

Recipes

A lot of people ask me what's the best way to cook bok choy, and there are actually several really excellent ways to make a delicious meal out of it.  Check out this feature from Williams-Sonoma, 5 Ways with Bok Choy, for ideas.  We have used all of these methods in our kitchen, and they are all great!

And here is a recipe for Colcannon, which is a traditional Irish dish made with potatoes, greens, and green onions.  It also has the added benefit of being very kid friendly, so if your little ones usually object to eating their greens, try this out!

CSA Newsletter for June 1, 2014

Farm Update

These chickens are the friendliest
birds I've ever met!  As soon as
we step outside, they all run to
greet us!

Well, we have an official start date for the CSA program this year!  We will be kicking things off the second week of June, so mark your calendars for either the 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th of June, depending on what drop-off you're signed up for.  There are a lot of really nice veggies coming out of the fields right now, but it will be during the second week of June that we'll finally have enough variety to give you a really good CSA share.  Around the farm, we've been irrigating a lot, and we are really looking forward to the rain we are likely to get tomorrow.  The chickens and pigs are also doing well.  The chickens are so friendly, and they like to follow us wherever we go as soon as we step outside!  They even chased my car down the driveway the other day!  The pigs are getting used to their new home, and they've been spending a lot of time under their shelter, trying to stay out of the sun.  I think everyone around the farm (people, animals, and plants) will be really glad when this heat breaks, so let's all hope for rain tomorrow!

What to Expect at Your First CSA Drop-Off

As we approach the start of the CSA season, it occurs to me that we have a lot of new people who have never been to a CSA drop-off to pick up their veggies.  So for those of you who are newbies, here's how it works:

These nasturtiums have edible leaves and flowers,
which are delicious and very pretty on salads.

The first step is simply to come to the drop-off location between 5 and 6 PM on the appointed drop-off day!  For the Alma folks, that's Mondays in the parking lot of His Place, right downtown on Superior St.  The Mt. Pleasant folks will have their drop-off on Tuesdays in the parking lot of Herbs, Etc. on Broadway.  Midland's drop-off will be Wednesdays in the back pavilion at the Eagle Ridge Church of God at 2808 Waldo.  (Midland also has a mini drop-off at the hospital for people who work within the hospital system, where we simply pre-pack the shares and leave them in the seating area behind the Center for Women's Health.  Before you get your hopes up about possibly being able to pick up your share there, I'm going to have to let you down.  The hospital has regulations that prevent anyone not affiliated with them from picking up their produce there, so unless you work for the hospital, you'll just have to come to the drop-off at Eagle Ridge and see us lovely people each week!)  And last but not least, our East Lansing drop-off is going to be in the conference

room space at ELFCO, which is on Northwind Dr, off Grand River a little bit east of MSU campus.  So now that you've arrived at the drop-off, now is the fun part!

The blueberry plants are in full
bloom, and should start producing
tiny berries soon.

At the drop-off, you'll see two big long tables set up, loaded down with lots of veggie goodness.  You'll want to hop in line and chat with people until you get up to the tables.  Once you get to the front of the line, it doesn't really matter which table you go to, because they both have the same stuff.  We just have two tables to keep the line moving quickly.  At each table will be about eight different "stations".  At each station, there will be choices of a few different kinds of vegetables and fruits, and there will be a sign telling you what your choices are and how many to take.  Usually, if you have a half share, you get to choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you choose two items at each station.  For example, at the first station you might have a choice between salad greens or spinach.  At the second station, you might have a choice between carrots and broccoli.  Then you go on down the line, choosing the appropriate number of veggies at each station.  Then, down at the end, we have our trading table.  At the trading table we'll have a few extra

veggies, and if you want to trade veggies that you picked up at any of the other stations for something that's on the trade table, you can.  That way, if you don't really want either of the options at a particular station (say, you have a bunch of carrots left from last week and you don't really like broccoli), you can trade for something you like better. 

The Swiss chard has really been growing quickly
with all this heat!

Then, once you've made all your choices, you are all set!  Most weeks we'll also have some additional stuff for sale, like our yummy free-range eggs, or perhaps extra blueberries, strawberries, or cherry tomatoes.  A lot of times, we have so much coming out of the fields that it is more than enough for the CSA, and who doesn't love extra strawberries?

Then, the final step is to take home all your goodies and make something delicious!  If you're stuck for ideas, you can check out the recipe in the newsletter.  I always try to pick a recipe that includes a lot of the things in the share and that doesn't call for a ton of additional ingredients.  Also, if you make something really great with your veggies, feel free to share the recipe on the blog, or

email it to me so that I can include it in a future newsletter!

Also, if there is a week where you forget to come to the drop-off and you wake up the next morning slapping your forehead, just let me know.  We can't harvest an extra share for you the next week if we didn't have advance notice that you'd be gone, but we can still try to get you some extra stuff.  Inevitably, there is usually at least one person who forgets to come to the drop-off, so we often have an extra share or two left at the end.  If you accidentally miss a week, feel free to come by at the end of the drop-off the following week and pick out some items that are left over.  This is kind of a win-win.  There is less waste, and you still get to make up the veggies you missed.

So this is how a drop-off works!  If you have any questions, just let me know.  We look forward to seeing you the second week of June at the first drop-off!

Recipe

Greens are definitely the stars of the show in late spring and early summer, so here is a recipe featuring one of my favorites, Swiss chard.  The recipe is for Sausage, Chard, and Lemon Lasagna, and it comes from Martha Stewart Home.  Check it out here!

Sausage, Chard, and Lemon Lasagna!
Doesn't that look awesome?

CSA Newsletter for May 25, 2014

Farm Update

Our piggies are starting to explore their new home.

This week has been a great week for plant growth, between having a lot of soil moisture and more ideal temperatures.  As the temperatures have warmed, the insects have finally started coming out and we have been fighting flea beetles on several crops. The insects appeared later this year than they usually do because of the long winter, but they are now here, and so begins the constant war we will fight with them until everything dies back in the late fall. We even have one bed of cabbage that has an infestation of ants, which we have never seen happen before.  It seems like no matter how long we (and by “we” I mostly mean Fred) do this, we learn a few new things each year.  We also turned in a lot of our cover crop to prepare the ground for our warm season crops like tomatoes and sweet potatoes, which are likely to be planted this week. Our coldframes are also in the process of being prepared for our main tomato planting as well. Also this last week,

The pigs are going to need names!  If you have any
ideas, find us on facebook and join the pig
naming discussion!

our piggies arrived at the farm!  We have six of them this year, and they are acclimating well to their new pasture.  Our chickens are also laying more eggs and are very happy feeding on the lush growth of spring.  Everyone around here (pigs, chickens, and people alike) are excited about the gorgeous weather!

Keepin’ it Local:  How we Distribute Our Produce Around Michigan

Most of you reading this newsletter are probably either past or current CSA members, or maybe you just love us enough to read our newsletter even though you live too far away to join the CSA (Hi Aunt Laura!).  Although the CSA is the main way we get our veggies into people’s homes and onto their plates, we also have other partners in getting our fresh organic veggies into our local food system. 

The evening sun on lovely green
 kale.  I'm probably a huge dork,
but I love stuff like this!

When we first started the farm, our intention was to have the CSA, do some farmers’ markets, and sell to some wholesale accounts such as restaurants and stores.  As it turned out, there was just not enough time to do the farmers’ market on a regular basis and keep up with everything else we need to do to make the farm work.  Also, selling at the farmers’ market usually involves a lot of produce waste, because whatever doesn't sell has to get thrown away (or in our case, fed to the pigs).  The CSA however, is working out well, continues to grow, and is a pretty efficient way for us to get our veggies into your homes at an affordable price.  Beyond the CSA there are a lot of other partnerships that help us get food to restaurants, stores, and even a few schools.  One of our main ways is to take our produce directly to area restaurants like The Brass Café and Camille’s on the River in Mount Pleasant, Fireside Grille in Shepherd, and Red Haven, Soup Spoon Café, and Fork in the Road in Lansing/ East Lansing.  We also sell directly to some stores such as ELFCO (East Lansing), Green Tree (Mount Pleasant), Natures Gift Organic Market and Lolande’s Market (Midland), and Mert’s Specialty Meats (Okemos).  These stores and restaurants are looking to set themselves apart from the crowd by having unique local flavors, and also by helping support local agriculture.  It has been great for us to be able to talk to and get to know the unique personalities behind these businesses and to experience some of the great foods that they provide.

Beyond these direct relationships, we also work with three different local distributors.  In the past, distributors used to have a less than stellar reputation with farmers due to poor business practices and extremely low prices for the farmers’ products. However, the small distributors we work with (Cherry Capital Foods in Traverse City, Earthy Delights in Okemos, and Wildroot Food Collective in Bay City) have a different focus and way of doing business from the old model, and now have enabled us to get our food into more places in Michigan than we would have the ability to do ourselves.  These partners have given us good prices for our produce, and they are able to provide their customers a great service by coordinating pick-ups from many different farms and bringing the products to the customers. All three of these groups pick up at our farm, which is really convenient for us and many other farms during the busy season. There is increasing interest in this type of model, and if you have ever heard of food hubs or local food aggregates, this is what that is referring to. 

These tiny lettuces will be
 salad mix at the first drop-off!

The CSA and our other food partnerships have been great, and we are always looking for more ways to get our food onto the plates of local consumers.  In fact, we believe one of the main hurdles to building a vibrant local food system is finding efficient ways to disseminate local foods from small producers.  One idea we are considering for the future is a home delivery option for the CSA.  We know that for some folks, going to the drop-off at the same time for 20 weeks can be a burden, and we are looking at ways to make it easier for those who are in a time crunch most of the season or otherwise have trouble making it to the drop-off.  If you have interest in a home delivery option or any ideas to share, we would love to hear from you as we consider this idea.

We hope this gives you a more complete view of how our farm works, and how we are always trying to find ways to better meet the demand for local veggies.  We are always open to ideas, and we appreciate the great amount of support we have received from the community of people who consume our veggies and appreciate the unique seasonal flavors and freshness we work hard to provide.  

CSA Newsletter for May 17, 2014

Farm Update

The cherry trees are in bloom in
the orchard!  We're new to fruit trees,
so it will be a steep learning curve,
but if all goes well, we should have
cherries in early July.

This week was a good week to for harvesting some of our early spinach and lettuce.  With warmer temperatures in the beginning of the week it really spurred on some of our overwintered and coldframe greens.  The frosts so far have not hit us very badly (although Fred was really worried on Thursday night, and he went out in the middle of the night to cover the strawberries). Only a planting of spinach with very small leaves seems to have been affected so far. Most plantings are looking very good and healthy.  Our new cultivator that Fred designed and had constructed came to the farm this week, and it has been working out really well. This is good because we have been hand weeding more of the first plantings lately, and this new cultivator will help greatly in limiting our weeding time.  The orchard is also starting to bloom so we are hoping these cold, somewhat frosty mornings will be over soon.  The chickens are starting to lay more of their small pullet eggs.  This small size occurs for often a couple of weeks as the young hens begin laying for the first time.  They have had a good time roaming the yard, although Fred is going to build a fence soon since the chickens seem to enjoy walking on Michele’s flowers and pooping on the deck.  We are starting to get more of our summer crew at the farm, and it looks like the crew will primarily be Keegan, Nate, Joe, and Charlie, all of whom have worked for us in previous seasons.  We are really looking forward to the start of CSA season, which will be the second week of June, so mark your calendars!

Things are really coming up in the coldframes!
These are the greens of Easter Egg radishes, which
are fun and multicolored.

My Farming Story, or How I Got Here From Where I Thought I Was Going

            People often ask me how I got into farming.  Probably because, truth be told, I don’t look all that much like a farmer.  “Did you grow up on a farm?” they ask.  “No,” is the short answer.  The long answer is “Well, kind of.  I grew up next door to my grandparents’ farm, but I never thought in a million years I would end up farming myself.”

            We lived about a quarter of a mile from my grandparents’ farm, and my siblings and I were constantly running up and down the path that my grandpa kept mowed in the cornfield between our yard and theirs.  Most of my cousins also lived within running distance of the farm, so we were always playing together at Grandma and Grandpa’s.  I grew up playing in barns and empty silos, running around in the cow pen, falling out of trees, and getting lost in the tall corn more often than I care to admit.  It was pretty idyllic, actually.  But it never occurred to me that that would be what I would end up doing with my life.  In fact, by the time I was finishing high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and it was not farming.  I was to be a high school French teacher.  Ever since I started school myself, I knew I wanted to teach, and now I knew what I wanted to teach.  I was a girl with a plan.

            I started at MSU that fall.  I made some great friends, studied hard, worked part-time at the cafeteria, joined clubs, pulled all-nighters, wrote papers, and more papers, and more papers.  By the time I returned for my junior year after studying abroad, I was even more confirmed in my choice of a career, and I couldn’t wait to get out there and impact those young minds, and hopefully impart to them a love of the language and culture that I had come to love.

Fred in the coldframes at MSU's Student Organic Farm
Summer 2004.

            Then, as the story often goes, I met a young horticulture student.  He was cute in sort of a nerd-boy way, earnest and principled, intelligent, driven, and uncomplicated in a way I was not used to.  Within a few weeks we were dating, within a year we were married.  Our career plans were unchanged; we would finish school, he would start an organic farm, and I would teach until we had kids and then stay home with them.

            And that’s what we did, with a few tweaks to the plan.  Instead of starting our own farm immediately after graduation, Fred took a management position at a large vegetable farm in Ohio, because let’s face it, it’s hard to get land when you’re 22.  That turned out to be a great decision, because during the six growing seasons he worked there, he got a lot of experience and learned some invaluable lessons, both in how to grow things, and in what we did (and didn’t) want our farm to look like.  And just like we had planned, I got a job teaching high school French, and I loved it.  I loved my students, I loved the school, I loved the community, and I even didn’t hate all the endless hours of lesson planning, unit writing, preparing, writing assessments, and grading.  And since I didn’t have kids and Fred worked long hours, I had enough time to do all of this to my own extremely high standards.  It was perfect.

            We also had a great group of friends who had a standard biweekly Friday night get-together, and we often saw them in between our normally scheduled events.  The group was made up of a few married couples, a few dating couples, and a few single people.  During the time we were with this group of friends in Ohio, a few of the single people started dating and got engaged, a few of the dating couples got married, and a few of the married couples started having kids.  And then we found out we were pregnant. 

There were two things I had always known: that I did eventually want to have kids, and that once I did, I would stop working and stay home with them.  Part of the reason it took us so long to have kids (we had been married five years at this point) was that I was having so much fun teaching and didn’t want to give it up yet.  Also, the fact that we had two incomes and no kids allowed us to put away plenty of money for the one-income transition we knew was coming.  Once we found out we were pregnant for Jane, we knew it was time to move back to Michigan, get some land, and start our farm.  We spent those months planning, both for the baby and for the farm.  How would we structure the farm?  Where could we get some quality land that we could actually afford?  What would be do for equipment?  Where would we live?  And of course, there were also the usual fears that you get when you are about to step off the edge.  What if we didn’t make any money?  What if we lost everything we had worked so hard to save?  Were we, in fact, crazy to leave our stable jobs and start something that was by no means guaranteed to work?

Fred, Michele, and newborn baby Jane.  October 2010.

But we were committed to the plan.  So just a few weeks after Jane was born, we bought our house, moved back to Michigan, and started preparing for our first growing season.  You know, all those changes they tell you not to make when you’ve just had a baby.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Little Jane playing with the soil at the farm.
May 2012.

Now, three years and another baby later, I can barely remember that other life, when I was speaking primarily French for eight hours of the day, didn’t know the difference between a beet and a radish, and had the luxury of focusing on something for more than three minutes at a time without being interrupted.  (Case in point:  I wrote most of this while the girls were asleep.  Then they woke up, and I have written a total of seven sentences in the last half hour, in between diaper changes, sippy cup refills, rushing a toddler to the bathroom, and breaking up a few squabbles over toys.)  But I actually couldn’t be happier, because now I have a new mission.  It turns out that I am now as enthusiastic about providing people with (and helping educate them about) fresh organic produce as I used to be about teaching French.  I love talking with people at the CSA drop-offs and other events about what a joy it is to eat food made with quality fresh ingredients, and I love being able to promote healthy living in this small way.  So maybe when my kids are all grown up I’ll go back to my original dream job, but for right now, I’m really enjoying the job that’s in front of me, weeds, dirty diapers, and all.

CSA Newsletter for May 13, 2014

Farm Update

Look at all these lovely little strawberry plants!
Pretty soon we'll be harvesting all sorts of yummy berries!

Hello everyone!  As the weather has warmed, the field work has become very busy and things are growing at an exceptional rate.  Most of the field is now planted and we were even able to sneak in an acre of cover crop early in the season as well.  So far we have been planting our cool weather crops such as kale, lettuce, carrots, and onions, and we also planted some basil, summer squash, and cucumbers in the coldframes last week. This week we will start putting tomatoes in the coldframes after we harvest the greens that are currently there.  These last few weeks have been great, as the warmer temperatures have spurred a lot of growth, but the weeds are coming fast and furious, so we are trying to stay ahead of them.  We are hoping that our new cultivator that is coming this week will help out a lot with the spring weeds. As for the chickens, they are now at our house and have quickly overtaken the yard.  We found the first few pullet eggs yesterday, so we expect to have a lot of eggs soon.  Our old dog Josie just moved back to the farm after staying inside with us for the winter.  She is happy to have the whole farm to explore again.  In the orchard, our fruit trees are going to bloom any time now, as will the blueberries.  We are really looking forward to another great season!

 The Many Benefits of CSA

If you’ve talked to me for even a few minutes, you’ve probably gathered that I am passionate about the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) concept.  I love CSAs because they benefit not only the farmer, but also the consumer, the environment, and the local community.

This garlic was planted last fall, and it will
                be the garlic you get in your share
                 this season.

In general, farming is a pretty uncertain, precarious business.  Traditional commodity farmers are subject to swings in the market which can make or break their seasons, and you pretty much need to have a lot of acreage if you are going to be able to produce enough crops to make a living wage.  Also, winter and early spring are when most farms incur a lot of their expenses, between repairing equipment, buying seed, etc.  So in the traditional farm model, where the farm does not actually have any income until the late summer when they harvest and sell their crops, most farms are operating in the red for most of the year.  And as anyone who has ever been in an uncertain income situation can attest, that is a pretty stressful way to live.  So one way CSA benefits the farmer is that the farm actually has income early in the year when they really need it.  Since members sign up and pay at least a portion of their membership early on, that really eases the cash flow issues that plague most farms.  Farmers also have a lot more control over their markets with the CSA model, and are not subject to the same price swings that commodity crop farmers often experience.  And growers who rely on farmers’ markets or auctions to sell their produce know that even if they have the loveliest veggies in the world, they are probably going to end up throwing most of it away if it rains on market day.  CSA also minimizes that risk, because when we harvest each morning for the drop-off, we already know where each tomato, cucumber, and bag of spinach is going.  The CSA concept really minimizes the everyday risk that is the reality for most farms.  It also allows us to be responsive to what the consumers want.  We’re experimenting with a few new fruits and veggies this year because people have asked us about them.  The fact that we get to talk to our CSA members at the drop-offs allows us to be more in tune with what people really want, which makes us better able to serve our customers.

Aside from benefitting the farmer, the CSA model also benefits the consumer.  For one thing, you can ask the farmer questions about exactly how something was grown, so you know exactly what you’re putting in your body.  Also, when CSA members pick up their veggies, their share has usually been harvested that very same morning.  Talk about fresh produce!  By contrast, when you buy veggies from the store, they have usually been harvested about a week earlier, which means that they won’t last as long in your fridge, and they’ve lost a little bit of flavor and nutritional quality during their cross-country journey.  It is also really easy to get stuck in a rut at the store, always throwing the same few items in your cart.  But with CSA, you get to learn about new fruits and veggies that maybe you’ve never used before.  When we first started doing the CSA, a lot of people would look at the kohlrabi and ask me, “What the heck are those?”  But since those first encounters, I have had several people come up and tell me that kohlrabi is now their favorite vegetable.  So you just never know when trying a new type of produce will make your life just a little bit better.

Little Jessamine playing with the produce stand at the Mt. Plesant Discovery Museum.
 She is already learning about how CSA helps connect the community!

There are also environmental benefits to the CSA model.  Most CSAs operate within their immediate geographical area, which eliminates the aforementioned cross-country trip that most produce takes to get to the store where it will be sold.  The average fruit or veggie travels 1200 to 1500 miles to the store, whereas our veggies travel an average of 28 miles to the various drop-offs.  That really helps reduce the fossil fuel emissions necessary to get each piece of produce from the farm to the consumer.  CSAs also tend to use more environmentally friendly farming techniques.  Even those farms that are not certified organic often still use organic practices, they just simply choose not to take on the expense and paperwork involved in being certified organic.  This greatly reduces the amount of chemicals that end up in the soil and water, improving the health of the local environment.  Small CSA farms are also much more likely to be doing things like rotating crops and including animals in their production systems, which reduces or even reverses the detrimental effects that conventional farming methods usually have on the soil.

One often overlooked benefit of CSA programs is the positive effect that they have on the local communities where they are present.  Often CSA drop-offs are somewhat of a community event.  If you show up to our Alma drop-off a few minutes before 5:00, you’ll see about 40 people waiting in line with their baskets for the drop-off to start, chatting with each other about recipes, articles they read recently, and a whole host of other things.  I love listening to the conversations people have while waiting for the drop-off to begin, and I’m glad that we can provide a place for that to exist.  Another benefit is that more money stays in the local economy.  When you buy your produce at a large chain store, the money you spend goes to some headquarters somewhere, and it has left the community.  But when you get your produce through a CSA or farmers’ market, the money stays in the community.  So if you’ve ever seen me at Stucchi’s having a sandwich with my girls, or getting coffee and granola at Green Tree, or picking up some bacon at LaLonde’s after we inevitably run out of our own, you can smile knowing that not only have you helped support our family, but also these other local businesses as well.

So for these reasons and many others, Community Supported Agriculture is a model that has benefits all around, for those who produce the food, those who consume it, the environment, and the community.  So thanks for being a part of it!