This week marks the halfway point in the main CSA season for this year. The sweltering heat has broken and the cooler days are such a breath of fresh air. I have been reflecting and feeling an immense gratitude that our CSA members and Fresh Stop members have partnered with us to make the CSA program not only possible, but thriving.
Ben and I have been farming for about 15 years, with a mix of part time farming, working on other farms, and then eventually starting Rootbound Farm about 8 years ago. This is the 6th year of our Rootbound Farm CSA program and we have 650 weekly CSA members and 600 bi-weekly Fresh Stop shareholders.
CSA is our focus and the lifeblood of our farm, but it hasn’t always been that way. Over the years we have hustled, dabbled, and flung ourselves head first into many different farm marketing strategies; We’ve grown Roma tomatoes for the Jimmy John’s sandwich chain, tomatoes and bell peppers for Papa John’s pizza, butternut squash for the “cheesy chicken” dish for Jefferson County Public Schools, and we’ve grown a wide range of veggies for Whole Foods, fine dining restaurants, grocery delivery companies, meal prep services, and small local grocers. Sheww! It has been a wild ride….
Growing good healthy food for our local community sounds pretty simple, but it’s been the challenge of a lifetime to figure out how to build a healthy and sustainable business doing just that. It is a grind to try to swim upstream against the current of the industrial commercial food system, a system that is efficient and cheap because all of the inputs are disposable – the natural resources, the land, the people, and the animals.
One of the magic pieces of CSA is that it allows us to be more efficient and that means there is more to invest in the people, the land, our community, our shared natural resources, and the welfare of all the farm animals. Food waste is an issue that is really plaguing our environment and economy. Every year in America, between 30 to 40 percent of food available for consumption goes uneaten and some research suggests about half of all produce grown in the country goes to waste. Ouch! It’s hard to fathom this massive waste because hunger and food access is still such a pervasive issue in our communities.
CSA tackles food waste on multiple levels. First, we don’t have to fight the illusion of bounty that plagues so many retail spaces. Even at the farmers market we are playing a guessing game of what the crowds will want that day and we need to have big bountiful displays in order for the produce to be visually pleasing. We typically end the market day with hundreds of pounds of excess items. Grocery stores also need to stock up and look plentiful and they are racing against shelf life – keeping those shelves stocked with perishable items that only last a few days. The transport process also creates a lot of waste when something as perishable as a tomato travels from another country (or even another continent!) across an ocean and then in a semi truck across many states to reach our plates. With CSA, we can plant, harvest, wash, and pack just the right amount for what our members want. We create our harvest lists for the upcoming week on Sunday afternoons and CSA offers us such precision. We can even foresee and plan for the donations for the upcoming week to make sure we are passing our bounty along to people in need through our partners at New Roots, Feed Louisville, and Feed the West. Below is a snapshot of our harvest list for the week to give you an idea of what leaves the farm in an average week.
CSA members are also savvy eaters who want to savor that farm bounty, and y’all don’t let a little “imperfection” ruin the day. The crisis of food waste asks us to do something many of us in America are not accustomed to being asked to do- eat food that is not aesthetically perfect! Food grown with respect to natural limits and without a cocktail of toxic herbicides and pesticides will look differently than the waxed and chemically manipulated products smiling back at us at the grocery store. When the flea beetles poke little holes in all of the arugula, our CSA members step up and eat arugula with some holes in it! We know you likely trimmed the worm tip off the corn or double rinsed the lettuce when the aphids were prolific – and we are deeply grateful that you did. Grocery and retail outlets would count those entire crops – acres and acres of healthy food – as a loss.
So we’ve all made it halfway through the season and I’m just thrilled, I hope you are too. CSA is a simple, yet also a pretty remarkable concept. We are disrupting and circumventing so many of the issues that plague a truly resilient and sustainable local food supply. Thank you for doing your part, it is a true honor to do ours.
