Every year I do a survey of our members to better understand how we did the past year so that we can make changes for future years. During the season I try to get a sense as to how the farm is performing by talking to people in the pick-up tent but this of course doesn’t reflect how we are doing for those who pick up at drop sites. And I suppose since a lot of members are Minnesotan they may not be comfortable telling me about their disappointment – we’re just too polite.
However, even though I find value in doing the survey I also find a couple things frustrating with surveys. The biggest frustration is there is no conversation. I can’t ask follow-up questions. I can’t get clarification on a comment. I have to go on what is said and infer the rest. And I may not be the best inferrer.
But before I go on and on and on, here is a few messages from our sponsors:
Be sure you rejoin for the 2017 season! We have had a great response to date but can always use more people signing up early so that we know how much recruiting is required for next season.
Also we are still selling winter FruitShares. We started two weeks ago but can prorate for the remainder of the season if you’d like to join. Contact me for a prorated price.
Now back to the survey response:
Here is my attempt to turn the survey into a conversation on some of the topics people raised.
Item one: Too much eggplant. Yes we know there was too much eggplant; that is why I apologized so many times in the newsletter. Hopefully people realize that it wasn’t our plan to have this much eggplant and not assume every season is packed with this much delicious eggplant. Perhaps next season will be too many tomatoes or some other vegetable that is hard to have too much of.
Item two: “I found that if I wasn’t at the site within the first 15 min some items were gone.” I have to assume this is for on-farm pick-up. If not, I am completely baffled. Anyway, since we are a farm and not a grocery store we are limited to what nature gives us. It would be great if everything ripened at once and when we wanted it to but obviously this isn’t the case. Most veggies ripen over time in somewhat of a bell shaped curve – a little to start, then a lot, then a few of the stragglers. (Unfortunately eggplants did not follow this curve this past year). So what we do to compensate for the nature of vegetable maturity is group items into categories that provide enough total items for the number of shares we have that day. For example, if we have 100 shares today we may have to group the 35 broccoli with the 60 cabbage and the 15 kohlrabi. Yes that makes more than 100; this is to allow everyone to have a choice (usually).
When we have situations like this we hold back some of the items for later arriving members. We don’t put every item out at the beginning. So for our example we might put out the cabbage and kohlrabi at the start then add the broccoli as that category diminishes. So if you arrived at tent opening time you wouldn’t have a chance at broccoli. If you arrive later all the cabbage may be gone. Though we can’t make everyone’s choices identical we do try to make everyone’s experience equivalent – no matter what time you arrive.
As an aside, with delivery boxes if something is short one week we may give it only to FamilyShares that week and then only CoupleShares the next. We keep track of this so that the veggies are spread across all our drop-site members. Again, our goal isn’t to make everyone’s experience identical (an impossible task) but to make everyone’s experience comparable.
Item 3: “I miss getting things like carrots and potatoes early in the year. Overall, I would like less radishes, more fall squash and pumpkins. I also thought popcorn was a bit of a disappointing item that seemed to fill lots of the boxes in the fall.”
I like this comment for a couple reasons: 1 – it explains what he/she was disappointed in without accusations, 2 – it is helpful feedback and 3 – there always has to be a third reason.
Let’s take each part of the comment separately. “I miss getting things like carrots and potatoes early in the year”. We try to get both of these planted as early as possible (4/15 for carrots and 4/27 for potatoes this past season). The first potatoes and carrots were harvested July 20th – the sixth week of the season. The potatoes were the same time in 2015; carrots were a week or two later in 2015. One technique to get crops earlier is to grow them in the greenhouse then transplant them into the field, unfortunately neither of these is conducive to transplanting. I doubt we can get the potatoes much earlier in the season. We grow one of the earliest varieties we can find – dark red Norlands. For carrots we try to get them earlier by covering the ground with black landscape fabric to warm it up faster. I can try to find earlier varieties of carrots but sometimes they aren’t available. So getting carrots much earlier would also be challenging. We could grow them in the hoop house but then we can’t use the hoop house for other warm season crops like tomatoes or sweet potatoes. I wish we had the funds to put up another hoop house, but there just isn’t a spare $9,000 laying around the farm.
However, one thing I would like to do is get more frequent carrots and potatoes over the course of the season – say every other week or so (for comparison, we had potatoes about every three weeks and carrots every four this season). Both of these have two major challenges for us – digging them out of the ground is very time consuming and washing them is equally time consuming. So for us to provide more of each we need to find ways to reduce the labor involved in digging and washing them. There is equipment out there to help with each or these, we just need to figure out how to pay for it.
“Overall, I would like less radishes, more fall squash and pumpkins.” Radishes are one of those things that some people love and others hate. This year we grew standard red radishes, Daikon radishes (which we’ve grown many times in the past) and watermelon radishes (a more mild radish new this year that was requested by one of our members in last season’s survey). We typically match radishes with other things in the pick-up tent so if you don’t like them you don’t have to take them. But delivery boxes are far more challenging. How do we provide radishes to those who love them without upsetting those who find them nothing but compost material? The only answers I can provide are 1 – find a way to use them that appeals to your taste buds and 2 – don’t think that you are wasting food if you don’t use them. On the first suggestion, try cooking them and serving them with a high-flavored sauce (this fall we tried radish cakes with a soy sauce/hot pepper/scallion dipping sauce and it was delicious even though I am not a radish lover!) On point two, think about the CSA like a gym. You aren’t wasting the free weights if you don’t use them. You aren’t wasting your monthly gym membership fee if you don’t go to spin class. You just choose to use those parts of your membership that meet your needs. We can certainly cut back on growing radishes. If anyone else wants to chime in please do. We’d like to try to meet everyone’s tastes.
Regarding the squash and pumpkins. This was an especially challenging year for winter squash and pumpkins. Every farmer I spoke to here in the Midwest lost a lot of their fall cucurbit crops due to diseases (one long-term farm in southern MN is in financial trouble due to poor crop production this season and may not survive the winter). And even those plants that survived were so waterlogged that the fruits didn’t store very long. So unfortunately Mother Nature was unkind to the fall crops this season. Past seasons were far more conducive to squash production; we typically grow thousands of winter squash each year. This is one of the attributes of joining a CSA and eating locally – sometimes you don’t get enough squash and sometimes you get too much eggplant but usually not in the same season.
Finally: “I also thought popcorn was a bit of a disappointing item that seemed to fill lots of the boxes in the fall.” Hmm, this is a tough one. I personally thought the popcorn was wonderful. I’ve heard others who thought it was quite fun and a great item for a CSA share. I realize it isn’t great nutritional food but I also feel that it is nice to have something a little more special in a CSA share that you wouldn’t typically find in a store (or maybe you can find popcorn on the cob in a store; I have been to a store in a while). Plus we packed popcorn in only one week for CoupleShares and two weeks (the second being a small amount) for FamilyShares – certainly not a ton of popcorn filling lots of boxes in the fall.
I wish I knew what made the popcorn disappointing for you. Did it not pop or was the disappointment that it seemed like box filler kind of like other CSAs use kale? Well, we don’t put a lot of effort into growing popcorn (approximately one total day of effort over the course of the season) so it didn’t take away anything from the box. It was nice that it filled in a space that was left vacant by the poor squash yields but that wasn’t the initial intention. I’d like to hear from others as to whether we should grow popcorn again. If most everyone else feels it is a waste of time we can certainly remove it from our repertoire.
Wow that is a lot of writing, and for you: reading, and I barely scratched the surface of the survey comments. I’ll take up more comments in the next few newsletters. In the meantime, if you haven’t filled out the survey please do so. And please let me know if you want us to grow popcorn next year!