A New Season

by | Apr 9, 2018 | Ask the Farmers


A new season is upon us. A delayed season perhaps, but the greenhouses are filling with plants and when the weather finally does warm we will begin to transplant and direct seed into our fertile fields.
This season of course will be better than the last. Farmers are optimist in character and who does not wish for a better future. Some of you know that Deb and I decided to discontinue the Winter Share for the Orchard Park and Amherst sites. We know we gave an inadequate reason in January. The truth is that it has taken awhile to put into words our reasoning. The short answer is that we wanted to reduce stress in our lives. The long answer is more involved and will be explained below.

First, Deb and I love growing food for you, our community. It is our lives work, our passion and our mission. We strive to grow food that makes sick people healthy and healthy people happy. We want to continue doing this well into the foreseeable future. To enable us to achieve this we need to adapt the farm to the realities of our aging bodies and to the environment we operate in both in terms of climate and business.

With the weather becoming more erratic we need to simplify and become more efficient on the farm. When many farms are slowing down in the fall we are intensifying the workload and time pressure to harvest tens of thousands of pounds of winter crops. Last year was the first time we worried that we would not get the harvest in before Thanksgiving; which is our absolute end date. Heavy rains and cold weather slowed harvest and we lost employees due largely to the difficulty of the harvest. By good fortune a former star employee came to work for us three days a week to help us get in the harvest.

The business environment of organic farming is rapidly changing, especially in NY. Online and traditional groceries are competing on price and convenience to win market share. An increasing amount of fruit and vegetables are being sourced from out of United States (31% for vegetables and 53% for fruit according to the New York Times), where costs are lower, the regulations laxer and the season favorable to the crop in need. Prices that domestic farmers receive for their crop is declining. This is happening while the costs to raise or produce the crop is increasing. The biggest expense of vegetable and fruit farming is labor. The cost of employees is increasing in NY every year and the minimum wage will rise to $12.50 and then perhaps $15. While this is good for our workers, and we pay well above the minimum wage in order to attract a great crew, it does put NY farmers at a disadvantage relative to foreign or even Pennsylvanian farms. We have to become more efficient on the farm in response to increased costs. We want to keep our shares affordable and we want to stay in business.

The Winter Share grew out of our desire to supply our family and shareholders with nutritious vegetables through the snowy months. We hated having to shop for vegetables in the grocery stores and ending up with flavorless produce. We also wanted to keep our key employees employed so that they would be with us for the next season. This year when Nicole our lead employee informed us that she would be leaving us in April to travel we found ourselves at a crossroad. Do we forge ahead and hope a crewmember can be trained to do the important work Nicole did. Do we do the work ourselves and risk burnout. We could keep doing what we did until we were broke physically or we can change now to ensure the long-term vitality of the farm.

So what’s new?

We love the Season Extension Share. It is the best of the summer and fall/winter crops. It is there for our Thanksgiving and Christmas family gatherings. A bounty of greens, roots, squash and apples are provided to choose from. We are planning this season to provide more lettuces and greens in December from our greenhouses. If you like the Summer Share you will love the Season Extension Share. All sites have the option of this share for November and December 2018.

We will not be participating in the Elmwood Village Winter Market this season. Instead we are working with Plato Dale farm, which distributes our vegetables to farm to table restaurants. Look for us on the menu. These are some of the restaurants that our vegetables are served in: The Black Sheep, Elm Street Bakery, The Grange, Olivers, Buffalo Proper, Carte Blanch, Marble and Rye, Craving, Lombardo, Hotel Henry and the Dapper Goose.

This year we want to provide more opportunities for you to visit the farm and experience agricultural life.
Knowledge transfer is important to us and we plan on opening the farm to shareholders for workdays and events. Harvest gatherings were a historic norm. Communities would come together to harvest and process the crops. Some of the events will be planned months in advance and some will be on short notice.

The first short notice event will be tree planting. We have 100 Spruce and 100 Cedars to plant for wind brakes and habitat. Look for an email and post when the weather gets warmer.

There is also a new blog this year. Ask Farmer Stew is your gate to the farm. If you have any questions about the how and why of our farm or farming in general this is the place to get answers. Only real news about the farm will be found here, direct from the source.

Industrial Hemp is a new crop for us this year. We have a license from NY Ag and Markets to grow hemp as an Affiliated Grower Research Partner. We started a new company named Rural Resurgence LLC, which holds the license. Native Offerings Farm will plant, cultivate and harvest the crop. A field day will be scheduled for shareholders to learn more about this important crop.

Since 2010 our family has been visiting Puerto Rico in the winter. We love it there. It is our summer vacation since we are too busy to enjoy ours here. In 2014 we purchased a property in Aguada with the purpose to develop an agro-ecological retreat. We named the property Casa Verano and have planted Avocados and other exotic fruits. The idea was to offer vacation rentals so people can use it as a base to explore the island. The property will be loaded with fruit trees and be so beautiful that you will not want to leave. That is the vision and we hope to be running in 2020. And yes, the property did survive Hurricane Maria.

This is our 21st season of the CSA. It is time for a change. It’s time to put community back into Community Supported Agriculture. With less time spent on winter crops we can do these other things and hopefully make the farm more relevant to your lives and continue to grow organic vegetables you can trust. I will end with a quote.
I ate at a Chinese restaurant recently. On the table there was a sign that read: You love food. We love customers.

Our Organic Future

by | Apr 9, 2018 | Ask the Farmers

 

We had a visitor from Toronto this weekend who picked up organic spinach from Costco.  It was the only organic spinach there.  Where it was grown was not advertised and the shopper did not notice Product of China printed on the back of the bag.
The Organic movement in its short history has been intimately tied to the environmental movement.  People wanted to live in an environment free of toxic chemicals and they wanted to eat food and drink water and beverages free of toxic chemicals and hormones.   The Locally Grown movement bound these desires by creating the demand for locally produced organic foods.   Farms thrived and the number of small farms grew reversing what had seemed like a death march for the small independent farmer.
Agricultural innovation also flourished.   With farmers making a profit they could afford to experiment and invest in new opportunities.
With farmers making a profit new generations of entrepreneurs entered the field bringing us a resurgence in Urban Farming, Greenhouse year-round production, Vertical Farms, Rooftop Farms, No Till Vegetables.   The list goes on.  Agriculture is exciting but there is trouble in paradise.
Organic is big business.  It is global as seen with the Chinese Organic Spinach.  As groceries compete on price I worry that local farmers will be priced out of the Organic market.
Ultimately it is up to us what the future of food will look like in our communities.  Next time you shop please look to see where that bag of spinach or cucumber is from.  Collectively we created Organic.  Let’s not have it taken from us.

Not for Sale

by | Apr 9, 2018 | Ask the Farmers

The New York Times had an interesting article titled;  Our New Global Garden.  In 2016, according to the NYT, 53.1% of the fruit and 31.1% of the vegetables consumed in America came from other countries.  These percentages are projected to increase.
What does that mean for farmers and farmland here in the USA?  How can we be sure the food is safe?  Is it really organic?
Paradoxically, our food choices are becoming both more local and more global.  CSA’s, Farmers Markets, and the Farm to Table movement are increasing in popularity.  Familiar brands feature the farms and farmers that supply the ingredients.
Can local and global food trends both continue to grow?  I hope we will be able to choose local when the future of buying groceries online arrives.  I hope the Farm on the menu is actually where the food came from rather than Restaurant Depot or US Foodservice.  I hope we can continue to provide our community with fresh healthy vegetables because that is what we want to do with our lives.  I suppose we could grow lots of something and ship it to China.   But then we would be just another name on a spreadsheet with a price attached.  We are not for sale.   We are here and we are farming: Locally.