Later this week I’ll be on a panel at the annual Ecofarm Conference in Monterey discussing CSA farming.  My hope is that the room will be full of farmers and would-be-farmers who have recently started a CSA or are planning to soon.  Most of the veteran CSA farms in Northern California are full or almost full to capacity, which means there’s both a need and an opportunity there.  A few farms in the area have gone the route of infinite expansion, blurring the line between a CSA and a produce delivery service by buying more and more of the contents of their boxes instead of growing it themselves.  Outside of California, there is almost limitless opportunity for CSA farms, as they may offer almost the only way for people in other states to get truly locally grown produce.  There are dozens of states that offer the essential ingredients in a CSA:  good soil, good climate, and population centers within driving distance.  These places are where most of the real growth in CSA farming has been occurring and will continue to occur.

NEW TECHNOLOGY
      CSA will always be about farming first and foremost, and there are plenty of challenges that any CSA farmer confronts, no matter where they are.  But in the fifteen years since we started our CSA, the internet has made many technologies available that could greatly simplify the process of signing up customers, establishing their preferences, collecting their payments, and communicating with them.  Email and Paypal are the obvious ones, but I’m sure that young CSA farmers will be making use of many other internet options.  Among others, several online applications now make it easy to survey your customers likes and dislikes, something we spent hundreds of hours doing the old-fashioned way when we first started our CSA.

 I’ve been writing this newsletter since 1994, and I still do it more or less the same way I did back then.  It gets created in MS Publisher, then photocopied onto paper and distributed to the drop-offs.  Then, it gets uploaded to our website, but sometimes this step gets delayed.

 For farmers that are just starting CSAs now, though, there are any number of improved technologies that they can use the internet to develop an ongoing relationship with their customers.  The standard website has never been a perfect match for a CSA farm:  it is time consuming to start and maintain, but also attracts attention from everyone in the world.  Most CSA farms have an extremely limited geography, and don’t have time to be responding to inquiries from anywhere else.

The internet application that most closely mimicks a CSA is Facebook, with its peer network.  Had FB existed in 1994 when we started our CSA, it would have been the perfect medium to spread the word about what we doing.  To this day, most of our new customers come from referrals from their friends or coworkers.  A farmer could easily post recipes, photos, and farm news on a Facebook group page — whenever it was convenient and timely, rather than on a set day of each week.  And you would know that all your customers were notified about it.  Subscribers could post questions and get them answered either by the farmer or by veteran subscribers.  An online community would be created, although the group would probably become unmanageable if the CSA had more than a few hundred members.

 Unfortunately, Facebook is a poor tool for archiving and searching, and doesn’t allow many layout options.  A mostly-text newsletter might be better served by a blog application.  Or you could use a tool like Flickr and do a mostly photo newsletter

 But why limit yourself to text and still photos.  I haven’t yet heard of a CSA farmer with their own cooking show on cable, but the internet offers another option here.  Instead of sitting down to type a recipe into the computer, a farmer could simply set up a webcam in the kitchen and record an instructional video for a recipe using that week’s vegetables.  With the miracle of Youtube, they could post that video.  A subscription feed or a link to their Facebook page would deliver notification of that week’s Recipe Video right to all their customers.  Even better, just let your subscribers do the video recipes.

     After 15 years of doing a weekly print newsletter, I am starting to find the format of our newsletter extremely limiting.   And of course, a paper newsletter is terribly wasteful.  I am still searching for a 21st century replacement for this newsletter that works better for us and better for you while saving some trees.  Let us know if you have any ideas.

IN YOUR BOXES
Cooking spinach is an old-fashioned vegetable, supplanted now by its distant cousin, baby spinach.  I love spinach salads as much as the next person, and salads are where baby spinach shines.  But I also love spinach sauteed briefly with garlic and olive oil, or tossed into hot soup just before serving.  But cooking baby spinach is a bit frustrating, as you watch that whole bag of tender leaves shrink down to a few tablespoons in the pan or pot.

Cooking spinach is a winter vegetable at TFF.  We don’t grow different spinach for baby and cooking; all of our spinach gets harvested once when it’s small for “baby”.  In the spring and fall, when it’s hot and dry, the spinach fields almost immediately get turned over after the first harvest and planted to something else.  This is one of the beauties of spinach.

But during (normal, rainy) winters, the spinach field just sits there after it gets harvested, and the plants keep growing.  They put out bigger, thicker leaves that would be tough and strong flavored if it were hot.  But the cold winter weather makes them incredibly sweet and succulent.

We don’t always harvest cooking spinach in the winter.  Wet weather makes harvest difficult, and causes mildew on the leaves.  But if it’s warm and dry, and we’re between plantings of baby spinach — as we are now — it’s a nice option.

All spinach (and chard) contains oxalyic acid that can cause an unpleasant feeling in your mouth if combined with certain other ingredients.  Cooking spinach contains more than baby spinach.  If you want to avoid this sensation, cook the spinach with a minimum of other ingredients — oil, garlic or leeks, hot peppers — and in particular avoid acids like tomatoes, lemon juice, or vinegar.-

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Thanks,

Thanks, Pablito