Full Shares: Salad Mix, Head Lettuce, Broccoli Crown, Carrot Bunch, Green Cabbage, Kale/Chard bunch, and a bag of edible flowers.

Partial Shares: Salad Mix, Carrots, Broccoli, and Cauliflower

Hello CSA members!

There is a saying in advertising, that if you said something once, you haven’t said it at all. So in borrowing from that idea, I’d like to reiterate a few items in hopes of cleaning some issues and questions from the Whitefish CSA.

• Whitefish CSA at The Farmers’ Stand is on Wednesday from 3:30pm until 6pm. If you are sending someone in your stead, you don’t need to let us know, but please make sure they know the times and routine. I will likely leave closer to 6pm to get back to the farm as the season progresses.
• Your refrigerator is a huge dehydrator. If you just throw your veggies in there they will be all wilted within two or three days. That is not a function of food freshness, but rather of function of food storage in your fridge.
• If you are not receiving our newsletter, it’s likely because your email is not from one of the major mail platforms such as gmail, and the mail chimp platform we’re using doesn’t like other addresses. If this is the case, you can find our newsletter each week on the right side of our homepage at twobearfarm.com
• Whitefish CSA….I would love it if you would bring your own reusable bags. At this point, about 20% of people are bringing bags, which means we’re going through about 150 bio bags each week. In order to help keep down the cost of the CSA, as well as the size of the landfill, please try to remember! Thanks!
• I appreciate all of you 🙂

This week the farm is shifting gears. Rebecca and the crew spent the entire day in the high tunnels trellising 800 tomato plants and 400 cucumber plants, which means tomorrow is going to be a huge harvest day. There is a ton of broccoli, cauliflower, broccolini, and sweet green cabbage that is ready out there! Not sure exactly how we’ll divy it up across the week, but expect some new items in the share this week.

It continues to be hot and dry on the farm, and we managed to miss all of the rain this past weekend, so lots of irrigating happening today as well. This time of year, it’s hard to know whether to want the rain from thunder storms or not, as they all pack the potential for hail.

This weekend our friends down at Amalthea Dairy got walloped by a freakish thunderstorm. They grow veggies on a similar scale as we do, and many of their crops were ready and about to be harvested. They receive upward of 4 inches of hail in some spots, as well as 5 inches of rain from a single storm cell in less than an hour. It basically obliterated all the crops, which is about 2 months of time, energy, care and labor, as well as lost revenue. We’ve had it happen to us, and it’s a really deflating and gut wrenching experience to lose something so good for no apparent reason other than fluke weather.

For some reason in this country, vegetable farming is not considered to be “real farming” by many other farmers nor in the halls of government. If you grow GMO corn to make plastic, ethanol, or to feed cows, you can get crop insurance, But if you grow vegetables to feed your neighbors and community, the USDA has little interest in helping you out. And while I could write a entire book on the issues with US Farm Policy, a dairy farmer quoted in the South Bend Tribune recently summed it up well …”The US will do almost anything – overproduce, subsidize, deplete natural resources, endanger animals, break federal employment laws, and empty rural America – just for the chance to sell “more” overseas.”

And so market farmers take on huge risk with little support. And while you may not realize it, that is why CSA programs were created. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It is a direct relationship between the consumer and the farmer, which helps keep the costs down, and helps you to “know your farmer”. But the two main ways in which the community supports the farm are 1. By paying for your CSA in the winter, you provide the farm the working capital it needs to get started in the spring with supplies and labor….you basically serve as the bank to the farm by providing a zero interest loan to be paid back in veggies. Which means the bank can never foreclose on our farm like banks seem to like to do in this country. And 2. You all agree to take on your piece of the risk. If a asteroid hit the farm before week one, and the farm was unable to grow any produce, you don’t receive a refund. Or if we get hailed out and don’t have food for a month or two, you would not receive back full value of your share. I’m guessing some of you are raising your eyebrows, as you had no idea that was part of the deal 🙂 But sleep well (knock on wood), in 15 years Rebecca and I have never missed a CSA delivery or failed to provide full value by years end.

Just a little insight as to what a CSA really is. Looking forward to seeing you all at CSA pickup!

Todd