August 6, 2008
Whew! It seems I blinked and July whizzed by. I guess that’s just what happens when the days heat up, the produce starts rolling in, and it’s all you can do to climb into bed at night after a long day at work. There are plenty of things to write about, but I’ve been asked to address what happens with our produce when there’s leftover food. My answer: what leftover food?
As a new farm, we are working hard to get our scale right. This year, we have 16 CSA members, a small farm stand, and one wholesale customer. Because our distribution is quite small, we have tailored our planting and harvesting to approximate, as closely as possible, the amount of produce we need to pick in order to avoid having extra. Sure, occasionally a shareholder won’t show or a particular customer won’t want a given herb or type of produce, but then we, the hungry farmers and avid cooks, gather up the scraps of the pickup and take it home to our own kitchen to feed ourselves.
Guessing how much to grow and harvest is always a bit of a crapshoot. How does a farmer avoid drastically underestimating, and thus running out of food, or over-harvesting and wasting money and time by letting extra produce go to the compost pile? It’s a tricky science, one that takes a lot of practice and experimentation to get right. This year, my bosses had the good fortune to be able to borrow the crop plans of farmer friends of theirs, thus helping them to plant to their scale based on Town Farm’s number of shareholders. So far, we’ve done pretty well. But there are inevitably variables that we just can’t predict - rain, drought, rot, poor germination, slow growth, etc. We do all we can to manipulate these unhelpful problems by fertilizing, hoeing and weeding, and covering crops during extreme weather, but sometimes crops just aren’t ready when, or in the quantity, that we need them. For example, this past week, a planting of cilantro that we were counting on to get us through two or three weeks of pickups only yielded enough for one single day, only a sixth of its expected yield. Alas, no cilantro for a week or so now, until our next planting is big enough to be viable for harvest.
Not all farms, of course, operate on such small numbers as we do. The farm I worked at last year, for example, used its 9 acres quite intensely, and grew for 300 shareholders and hunger relief donations. Our method was to estimate the number of shareholders that would show on any given day (experience helped us predict patters, but there were always surprises- the shareholders has the chance to show up on any of three days of every week), and harvest that many shares. Sometimes we ran low and had to do emergency harvests late in the evening, other times we way over-guessed. In those cases, the extra was packed into crates and picked up by various hunger-relief charities that counted on us to provide them with produce for their food supplies.
In coming seasons, Town Farm may have to adopt a similar model. Next year, my bosses are planning to offer 75 shares, as well as expanding their wholesale operation and selling at a brand new farmers market. Guessing numbers becomes harder as the numbers go up, and how much to bring to market? One never knows.
But in the meantime, yours truly has the opportunity to keep her fridge full with fresh food largely due to a slight overplanting, imperfect plants (I don’t mind split carrots or tomatoes with a tiny rot spot), or no-show shareholders. No waste, and a beautifully varied and nutritious diet.
To find your local food bank, go to: America's Second Harvest
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