Hi Everyone,
In this update:
1. Last pick-up of Summer Session this week
This week will be the last week of pick-ups for the Summer Session of 2005. Once again, remember that the last week before Halloween is especially busy with school tours. On Tuesday and Friday it would be best, if you want to avoid a lot of noisy children and a lot of traffic, to come after 2:30. Saturday pick-ups should encounter less outside traffic than the last few weeks, but if you want to avoid even more of it, pick up your produce closer to the 10:00 hour. We’re sorry for all congestion during October. It’s the only month out of the five CSA pick-up months that we are open to the public. I have a few things to say about that below.
2. Registration for Fall Session and next Summer
We are very pleased to see that many of you have signed up for both Fall and Summer Sessions already. There is a modest financial incentive to join the Summer Session before November 1st (twenty-five dollars will be taken off the cost of your share).
Fall Session registrations are going very well. Remember the “off-season” Sessions (there are four of them) only last six weeks. Fall Session starts on the first Wednesday in November. This year we will be delivering boxes to our depots on Wednesday, November 2nd.
We’ve already had a number of people ask when is the last date they can join the Fall CSA. For the first week, we need to have your registration no later than this Sunday, the 30th of October. We will be calling everyone this weekend (October 29th and 30th) to confirm depot location. You can register this week in the market (we have hard copies of the application form). You can also register on-line, which is easy and which has been done by many of you already. If you choose to register on-line, you have the option of also paying on-line via pay-pal, which is a convenience that a lot of members tell us they appreciate. The whole on-line registration is fast, particularly if you done it once (your contact information will be automatically filled in when you type your name).
If all else fails, you can just give us a call by Sunday (425-222-4558) and leave a message saying you want to be in the Fall Session.
3. What is in the Fall Session Boxes and why should we join?
We’ve been asked by quite a few members this last week about the Fall Session boxes. This is old information to most of you, but we do have new members, and for their sake I’ll repeat a few things here about the Fall Session.
The Fall Session (along with Winter, Early Spring, and Late Spring Sessions) is very different from the Summer Session. Our Summer Session requires a commitment of five months. We use only produce grown on our farm in the Summer Session. The Fall Session (and the others) each requires a commitment of only six weeks. The Fall Session runs from the first week in November (this year Wednesday, November 2nd) to mid-December. At the end of the Fall Session (which takes us to the middle of December) we take a six-week holiday break. Winter Session Starts on Wednesday, February 1st.
For the Fall Session we are not able to supply everything from our farm. We still have some things of our own—broccoli, cabbage, onions, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, eggs, and a few other things. But our growing season is mostly over. So we do what other delivery services do: we buy from other farmers. All the produce we buy is Certified Organic. It is as local as possible. We include in the boxes some soft fruit (apples, pears), and some organic oranges, bananas, mangoes, and things like that.
We endeavor to price our Fall Session competitively. The cost ends up being less than you’d pay for the same produce at organic outlets, and the food is fresher. We include a half-dozen eggs each week (you can get more or less by making arrangements), and you can alter the contents of your boxes by checking our web-page weekly and e-mailing us if you’d like to get more or less of some item.
Why should you get your off-season produce from us? Well, we certainly don’t have anything bad to say about the many delivery services that have sprung up. We know most of the owners of these services, and know them to be conscientious and honest. The best reason for getting our boxes is probably to continue your support of Jubilee Farm. You know who we are, and what we do; the off-season CSA is a big financial help to us and has allowed us to both pay those nagging off-season bills and to buy equipment and hire help that enables us to be better farmers.
4. Beef and Pork
There has been a great deal of interest in our beef and pork. The pork “flew” (so to speak!) out the door. The beef is a little more of a challenge, for two reasons. First, the pork is a much smaller quantity and a half-a-side can fit more easily into a smaller space. The beef, even a half-a-side, is more “quantity.” And it also costs more.
At this point all the pork is spoken for, and over half of the beef. We’re sitting on pages of names of people who have signed up during pumpkin season seeking information about our beef. We’re not worried about selling it, but before we go to the outside list, I’d like to offer something that might help some of you, our members, get in on the beef.
The offer is this, and I probably should have thought of it before. We can’t cut and wrap the beef in a smaller unit than a half-a-side (that’s one-quarter of a cow). But it’s possible that you might want to share a half-a-side which would cut down significantly on the amount your have to store and on the total cash outlay. It might also be good for some of you who are curious enough about grass-finished beef to try some, but who want a smaller portion. As I said, the butcher just can’t divide the cow into less than quarters. But if you are interested in sharing one of the quarters, you could send us a note (jubileefarm@hotmail.com) and we could pair you up with another member who would like to share a quarter. You would then need to talk to each other and make the arrangement for payment, pick-up, size of cuts, and how to divide the meat. If that sounds interesting, let us know right away.
5. A word about being open to the public in October
The number of visitors to our farm this October has been pretty amazing. We’ve always done a lot of school tours, and this year we’re doing no more than usual. But on the weekends we’ve had more people out than ever before. We don’t advertise, so that’s not it. We did get mentioned in the Times as being an alternative to some of the very “commercial” pumpkin operations, and that has attracted some. We’ve also had some dry weekends which always make people more interested in getting a pumpkin from a farm than from getting it from the grocery store.
Most farms have one “cash crop,” and I guess ours is pumpkins. The truth is that we still need a cash crop. The CSA is doing well, but to be honest, we’re still not completely sustainable financially. We’re doing much better, but still not quite there. I’m sometimes asked just how many members it takes to fully support a farm. I’m sure it varies from farm-to-farm. For us, it’s taken a long time to come to a number, but I think we would need about 400 members. The thought of growing that much food each week used to terrify me, but it certainly doesn’t now. An additional pick-up day would alleviate the potential for too many people here at once, and would actually decrease the number we have here at any one time from what it is now. We’d love to have that number of members, and we expect to at some point. Then we wouldn’t need our pumpkins as a “cash crop,” and could use the October pumpkin season even more than we do now to promote local, organic agriculture. In balance, though, we look back and see how far we’ve come, and have to recognize that things are getting better each year.
6. Last newsletter in December
Because there’s a fair amount of abuse of e-mail lists, and because we want you all to know what we do with ours, I’m going to repeat what most of you know. We will keep the list intact until December, when we will send a final note for the season. At that point we delete the e-mail list completely, so that if you want to remain on the list, you will need to go to the web page and sign yourself up (which takes less than a minute). We would ask you not to e-mail us requesting to be put on the list; it would take you longer to do that than to just do it yourself. And if you do it yourself, it will be done right!
We don’t keep the e-mail lists from year to year because we don’t want to bother people who may no longer want to hear from us. Those who want to hear from us will take the minute to sign up—and probably appreciate exercising their prerogative to continue hearing from us or not.
We’ll remind you of all this in the final December newsletter.
7. End of Season Surveys
This week we will be handing out end-of-season surveys. We hope you will take one, reflectively respond to the questions, and return it (or fill it out on your pick-up day). We take these surveys very, very seriously, and come up with ideas that we implement the following year. So we hope you will help us to improve our CSA by thinking about what you liked this year, what you didn’t like, and changes we might need to make. Wendy and I will read each one carefully, and try to make changes where we can. If for any reason you don’t get a survey at the barn, please drop us a note (jubileefarm@hotmail.com) and we’ll send a copy.
8. Reflections on the 2005 season
We see a lot of people in October who want to know how the season went. It’s a natural question, and I believe it’s not just an attempt to make conversation (although perhaps at times it is). My response comes easily. It’s true that we can think of many things we’d would do differently if we could go back and redo 2005. But I also feel like in our 10th year our CSA has finally come “of age.” There will certainly be changes in the future each year as we try to improve. And we’re excited to see what ideas and suggestions from you emerge from the returned surveys. But all this notwithstanding, our feeling is that this year, perhaps for the first time, we did well enough that we can say something like “if there are members for whom this year wasn’t ‘good enough,’ there probably won’t be a year that is good enough.” I hope that doesn’t sound like complacency. We just look back at the lists of produce available during the season and believe that for the money, we’ve provided very good value. And considering the non-pecuniary values (which we can’t really take credit for but which probably far outweigh the others) the CSA membership is providing everything I hoped it would when we started ten years ago.
As always, we’re a little weary as the season winds down. We’re also a little sad to be saying “goodbye” to many of you for the off-season. But both Wendy and I are looking forward to those quiet, rainy days in November and December when we’ll have much less to do.
Thanks again to each one of you for supporting local, organic agriculture and helping to make Jubilee Farm a successful Community Supported Agriculture Project.
Erick and Wendy Haakenson