What’s Growing This Week:    Carrots  Baby Bok Choy Satsuma Mandarins Green Garlic Potatoes Chard Apples—-# Broccoli (M, L) Meyer Lemons (M, L)—% Cabbage (L) Leeks (L) Melogold  Grapefruit (L)

CSA FARMERS OF THE FUTURE
With the limelight shining on energy use, global warming, and nutrition, people are focusing on eating more locally produced fruits and vegetables.  CSA farmers are benefiting.  Here at Terra Firma, we have added almost 400 new subscribers in the last year, making us one of the biggest in the Bay Area (companies like Planet Organics, with much larger customer bases, are not true CSAs because they do not grow the food themselves).  We like to think that the reason for our growth is because we do a good job and farm in a great spot, but the trends have to help.

 The growth in CSAs brings challenges and opportunities.  I recently returned from the EcoFarm Conference in Monterey, an annual gathering where farmers, activists, distributors and scientists share ideas and experiences, get inspired, and eat lots of great food.  While there, I learned that all the other established CSAs in Northern California are seeing just as much growth or more than TFF.  This is exciting — growing for a CSA is a very rewarding experience for almost everyone who is doing it — but it also raises concerns.  Because most CSA farms are pretty small, there is a limit to how much food most of us are going to be able to grow.
 
Let’s face it, if we all wanted to be large farmers, we would be farming in a different way.  So what happens if — and most likely, when — the demand for CSAs here and around the country exceeds the supply provided by existing CSA farms.  We’ll need a whole new crop of farmers to step in and feed those customers.  Some will be experienced farmers who are switching from other crops and marketing schemes to the CSA model.  Others will be young folks from non-farming backgrounds who are learning from scratch.

 The EcoFarm conference provided some obvious hope.  The last time I attended the conference, six years ago, the mood in the organic farming community was gloomy.  Farmers — particularly small farmers — were struggling and large growers consolidating.  There were few young people in attendance, and most of those there were activists, not farmers.  The message was clear — this lifestyle might be environmentally sustainable, but you can’t make a living doing it.  This time, there was a whole new crop of young farmers and people interested in farming.  And the message communicated by speaker after speaker was both optimistic and inspiring:  Not only is organic farming now a viable way to make a living, but sustainable agriculture is critical to the future of humanity.  Before this new crop of farmers retires, the way humans beings produce food and eat may determine the survival of our species.  When fossil fuels disappear, the nations that have protected and nurtured their local food production are going to thrive, while others fail.

 Returning to the nitty gritty details, there’s another issue.  Many CSAs around the country are run by farmers who will be retiring in the next ten years, and many of them don’t have a plan to hand their farm over to the next generation.  Many of them have children who grew up seeing a life only of constant work and struggle, and are not interested in following that life.  But retiring CSA farmers have another living organism that they have nurtured over the years — their community of customers.  It would be a pity if all these decades-old CSAs across the country, with all the relationships and knowledge they have created, simply evaporate.

 Here at Terra Firma we have spent a bit of time planning for the succession of the farm from generation to generation.  Paul Holmes is 15 years older than I am, and our new partner Hector ten years younger still.  Hector has other family members who are interested and involved in Terra Firma, including his mother Genoveva, father Alfredo, brother Victor and son Hector Junior.  Paul Holmes’ son Walker could grow up and develop an interest in farming.

 If the growth in our CSA continues as quickly as it did this year (a big “if”), we will soon be put in a position where we may decide to cap the amount of subscribers we choose to serve.  We have reached a point in the evolution of our farm where our goals of financial stability have been met; now its time to focus on quality of life issues — primarily, spending less time working and more time enjoying our families and life.

 At the end of a roundtable discussion among CSA growers of all sizes at the Ecofarm Conference, a young man approached and asked me if I had the time to answer a few questions.  One of his questions was how we might decide which new and growing CSA to recommend to the customers we turn away when we reach our limit.  I told him I needed to think about it — it’s something that has never occurred to me, but it almost certainly will come up in the next few years.  Maybe it’s a good topic for a session at next year’s Ecofarm conference.

IN YOUR BOXES
Chard is a close relative of beets and spinach, with a similar flavor to both.  It is almost always eaten cooked, either sautéed, steamed, or added to soups.  Unlike those two crops though, we harvest Chard from the same planting all fall and winter, pulling off individual leaves as they reach the right size and bunching them together.  The plant responds by growing more leaves.  In contrast, beets are harvested as a whole plant, and the root itself is ripped from the ground.  With spinach, we harvest the leaves once as baby spinach; sometimes we plow the field under and plant something else, but other times — like winter when it’s too wet to do that –- we allow the plants to grow new leaves and then harvest them as larger bunching spinach.

Lately, a few of my personal friends who subscribe asked me why we haven’t had much cauliflower lately.  We had numerous problems with our cauliflower crop this year — and to a lesser degree with broccoli.  First, the seedlings were affected in the greenhouse by a root rot that killed probably 50% of some varieties.  Cauliflower appears to be particularly susceptible.  As a result, our fields were much smaller than we had planned, and thus could be expected to produce less.

Still, we had a few nice fields of cauliflower that should have been ready to harvest this month.  When they began to reach harvestable size, we discovered that they were entirely infected with aphids, which render the heads unharvestable.  Some years we are able to selectively pick uninfested heads; this year there were none.
 All is not lost, since our normal cauliflower season goes from January to late March.  We have several fields of immature plants that may produce useable heads, although the plantings are smaller than we would like.  And the non-stop cold, wet weather we’ve had has stunted the plants, meaning the heads will be smaller when they are ready to harvest — further reducing our yield.  We will be communicating with our neighbors in the hopes of obtaining any surplus cauliflower they might have.

    Pablito
 

Please make sure to include your account name, the one on the sign off sheet ? on the box, in every correspondance to Valerie

Recipes............................

CSA membership fees ~payment due day is first of month.~~ Quarterly discounts are given for any 3 month period only if paid in advance.
They are given as an extra credit when the payment is applied, you won't see your monthly rate change.
 

For mid-month changes,  Up/downgrades are $5 per week per increment.  Small to large is $10.

Vacations ? Billing Inquiries
We need seven days notice before a vacation hold or other change of service.
Contact Valerie through voicemail at (530) 756-2800, or e-mail Goldenbell@aol.com.  Include your account name in full (what's on the sign off sheet).

Account Balance Inquiries The account sheet is hiding under the sign off sheet each week with your account balance on it.  Mid month I've been e-mailing statments, so if you're not getting it send me an e-mail requesting to be added to the list. To be able to read the statements you need to be logged in as an administrator on a PC, and virus programs may corrupt the file. Some Mac operating systems do allow the file to be viewed.  We can't resend them, and it wouldn't work any better the second time anyway.

MAILING ADDRESS:
Terra Firma Farms, Inc
P.O. Box 836
Winters, CA 95694
(530) 756-2800
www.terrafirmafarm.com
Goldenbell@aol.com

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