By: Farmer Richard and Chef Andrea
This is it. The last CSA box of the decade! At this point in the season it’s always helpful for us to take a step back and evaluate. So here’s our 2019 CSA year in review. Over the course of our 30 week season we delivered over 70 different vegetables and a handful of fruits! That doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that we had 8 different varieties of potatoes, about 10 different varieties of winter squash, several different types of onions and six different types of head lettuce. If you have a long road trip coming up over the holidays we challenge you to make a list of all the vegetables you can remember eating out of your CSA boxes over this past season and see how close you can get to 70. “Eat a variety of fruits and vegetables” they tell us. Well we have that recommendation covered, and then some!
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| Healthy strawberry blossoms from June 2019. |
Every season has opportunities and challenges. We weren’t sure how we were going to pull off the first few boxes of the season when spring turned out to be wet, cold and late! Mother Nature throws us curveballs for sure, but she always manages to keep us fed. She came through for us with a perfectly timed ramp season and we were able to deliver two solid weeks of ramps with two bunches per box. We followed up ramps with a nice run of asparagus harvest that extended for 5 ½ weeks. Just when we were fretting about what we’d put in the box when some of our spring crops were lagging about a week behind schedule from when we needed them, the head lettuce in our greenhouse tunnel was ready to pick and the field crops followed right behind very nicely. We delivered over 6 different varieties of head lettuce this year as well as salad mix for about 2-3 weeks in the spring and another 4-5 weeks in the fall. Strawberry season was late this year and, unfortunately, the season ended very abruptly when we got hit with rain that super-saturated the berries and caused the quality to drop quickly. While that was a disappointing way to end the season, the berries we picked earlier were delicious and at the peak of the season we had a week where we packed 2 quarts AND 2 pints in every box!
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| Garlic Harvest 2019 |
Once the season gets going, it’s seems to just fly ahead at full speed. No sooner than we had finished strawberry season, the garlic field called out for our attention. We were so thankful to FINALLY have a good crop of garlic after several disappointing garlic harvests. Every box this year contained garlic in some form! Our onion crop started out looking really good too, but some mid summer rains, heat and winds changed the trajectory of that crop very quickly. When the tops started to show signs of disease and toppled over, we had to get them out of the field at a fast pace to avoid losing them. Thankfully though, we had enough to reach the end of the year.
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| Sweet corn ready to be harvested in August 2019. |
Sweet corn was another summer crop that afforded us some wins and some losses. Our first and last plantings of the season were sparse and disappointing due to weather related field conditions. While we would’ve liked to have picked more sweet corn, we did have some pretty fantastic tasting corn and managed to have about four weeks of harvest overall. This year was not a blue ribbon tomato season either. Our first crop was hit with disease early on and it felt like we had barely even started picking them when the vines started to die and we had to abandon the crop. The effects of high humidity and heat created the perfect conditions for leaf disease despite our best efforts. Thankfully, our second crop fared much better and we were able to get about 12 weeks of tomatoes overall. Tomatillos, on the other hand, produced very nicely this year and we were able to include them in four boxes which is more than we’ve done in past years.
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| Our crew putting up stakes for tomatoes in June 2019. |
We win some, we lose some, but we always have food on the table and this is what CSA is all about. This is our guarantee to you as we share in the bounty and the loss of every growing season. We all eat our way through the different parts of the year, with an opportunity to be acutely aware of the impact rain, temperature, storms and sunshine are having on our food supply. We have a diversified farming operation and some weeks you may not have noticed that we were having challenges with some crops. This is because we are able to divert product from our wholesale markets sometimes to pack it in CSA boxes instead. However, we can only do that to a certain point as our business needs to remain financially viable.
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| CSA box assembly line! |
We do believe our CSA offers members a good value. Over the course of the season we track the value of our box contents and it’s always interesting to see just how many dollars of produce we actually deliver in a season. After this week’s box is packed, the total for the season for all 30 boxes, based on our market prices, will total about $1,300. Compare this to our weekly share price of $1,050 and you’ll see that you received a value that is about $250 greater than what you paid! Please note, this is just the value of the vegetables. This does not include the value of communications, newsletters, recipes and other resources you receive with every delivery. This also does not include the value of having a connection with our farm and an open invitation to visit and have a transparent look for yourself to see just where your food comes from. We mention this as a reminder that participating in CSA is a much different model for sourcing your food than going to the grocery store each week and there are just some things CSA represents and provides that will never be matched in the same way by a grocery store. We do have a “secret shopper” who visits three different retail grocery stores each week to compare prices and selections available in these stores to the contents of our box. However, it isn’t always an apples to apples comparison. On average, there are about two items in every box that are not available in the retail stores and often the selections are not sourced from a local grower. The other point we’d like to make is that organic options for these vegetable selections are not always available while in contrast, every single item you receive in your CSA box is certified organic.
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| Squash Harvest 2019 |
In less than two weeks we’ll roll over into a new year. Once our final week of deliveries is completed we’ll turn our full attention to planning and preparing for the 2020 growing season. Our 2020 CSA sign up form is now available on our website. We’ve decided to continue our 2019 prices and share offerings for the 2020 season. We’ve added one new site each to the Twin Cities and Madison. We’re very happy to be partnering with TwinTown Fitness in Minneapolis to offer CSA pickup at their gym for both gym members and the general public. In Madison we’re excited to be partnering with Sitka Salmon Shares to offer a CSA pickup at their facility located in the recently renovated Garver Feed Mill. We are still looking to add a few more sites to our Madison area on either Thursday or Saturday to provide access to some underserved areas. If you have any suggestions or are interested in hosting a CSA site in 2020, please let us know!
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| Hon Tsai Tai field 2019 |
Many of you are aware that CSA membership across the nation has been on the decline over the past 10 years or so. We’ve watched the number of boxes we’re packing on a weekly basis drop from about 1,100 to about 600-650 boxes per week. This has contributed to a financial strain on our business as we strive to keep our farm financially viable. We remain hopeful and steadfast in our belief that CSA is a unique and valuable model both for farmers and for eaters. This is why we keep coming back year after year and continue to explore ways we can do what we do while continuing to push ourselves to learn, research and farm better each and every year. We are beyond grateful for all of you who are dedicated to CSA as well and appreciate your notes of encouragement and continued support.
As we look to the next season our reality is that we need to not only reverse this downward trend, but we need to increase our membership significantly. We know word of mouth is by far the most effective way to recruit new members and connect with the community. If CSA has had a positive impact on your lifestyle, we hope you’ll share your experiences with your friends, family members, colleagues, or anyone else who might be interested! We do have a referral program, so encourage anyone who’s signing up for the first time to include your name on the referral line of their sign up form so we can send you a referral coupon as our way of saying “Thank you so much!”
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Our happy crew cleaning ramps
for CSA boxes this spring. |
We are also exploring some ways we can connect with our community in 2020. In particular we are interested in pursuing some creative collaboration with some of our talented food bloggers, cookbook authors, chefs, etc in the region. If you work, or play, in this space and are interested in collaborating with us to brainstorm some fun ways we can work together, please send us an email or give us a call!
In closing, we have one more small request. If you have not already done so, we ask that you take a few minutes to complete our end of season CSA survey. We sent an email with a link to the survey last week and will be resending that link on Thursday, December 19. If you’d be willing to offer us some feedback and input, we’d really appreciate hearing from you. We do read each and every comment.
As we sign off for 2019 we want to say one huge, final THANK YOU! Our members are the reason we get up each morning and whether you realize it or not, you are an important part of what we do. We hope you enjoy the holiday season and don’t forget to spend a little time out in the natural world. We’ll see you in four short months. Until then, I leave you with visions of fresh, green ramp leaves; the scent of sweet, sun-ripened strawberries; and the memory of fragrant, sweet juice from a French Orange melon running down your chin.
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