What are we thinking about here on the farm? Find out below but first a few announcements:
We are still taking orders for Fruit, Eggs and Coffee. If you consume any of these items please consider buying from us. It not only helps our farm but also small, local, sustainable businesses here in the Twin Cities. The fruit is a delicious, mixed box of certified organic fruit from a variety of small, organic growers. The shade-grown, hand-picked, sun-dried, fair-trade coffee comes from Velasquez Family Coffee, a small family run coffee company importing coffee beans from the family plantations in Honduras and roasting them here in the Twin Cities. Can’t get much closer than that to buying local coffee in Minnesota! The eggs are certified organic, free-range chicken eggs raised by Amish farmers in Western Wisconsin. All of these products are great additions to your VeggieShare!
Still shooting for June 15th or June 22nd as our starting week.
Anyone who ordered herb/annual plants and have not picked them up yet please do so soon. They miss you!
Farm News
I’m sure everyone is aware of the military flyovers for honoring and thanking the healthcare providers saving lives while putting their own in harms way. We here at Fresh Earth Farms appreciate their dedication and hope that the safety protocols and equipment are sufficient to prevent any unnecessary transmission of the virus. Though we farmers are not putting our lives at risk (well anymore than usual) we did have our own unique flyover this week. In fact we’ve had a couple of them. A pair of sandhill cranes flew over the farm providing us a few bugles calls as they passed by. We’re not sure if they are two of the three we had hanging around last fall — we called them Larry, Moe and Curly — but hopefully they stick around for the whole summer. They are large, loud, impressively gangly birds and just fun to watch. It is times like this that I wish I had a good video camera ready to record at a moments notice.
Other than flyovers we’ve been spending time planting, cultivating, weeding and greenhouse seeding. We’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about what processes and procedures we need to implement to prevent transmission of corona virus for both our customers and our employees. We want to provide as close as possible the experience our members are used to but not at the expense of costing people their health. I’ve been reading a lot of information from various sources (Minnesota Department of Agriculture and the University of Minnesota Extension to name a couple) as well as participating in online classes to find ways to minimize virus transmission. Every farm — and in fact every business — has its own challenges. Figuring out what works best for each is left as an exercise for the owner of the business. They can give us ideas but they can’t provide us the solution.
So I was thinking about numbers while figuring out what our protocols will be. I’m a numbers guy. I’ve always been a numbers guy. Single digit, multiple-digit, odd, even, positive, negative, natural, real, whole numbers, rational, irrational, prime, composite, imaginary, complex. I love them all. Decimal? Great! Hexadecimal? Even better! Binary? What is there not to love? Then there are the specific numbers. Infinity is nice number. Euler’s number is nothing to sneeze at. You can always count on Planck’s constant. Avogadro’s constant. Gravitational constant. Gotta love the constants! In fact, I love numbers so much I use the last six digits of PI as my online password. Numbers are number 1 in my opinion.
As I said, I was thinking of numbers as I was going through our membership list this season. There are a lot of numbers to digest. How many boxes fit into the delivery van? How many squash do we need to plant? What is the application rate of fertilizer for the sweet corn? This year most of the questions and the answers are the same as past years so no big deal. The one big difference though is due to the number COVID-19. In particular how do we reduce the possibility of transmission.
My first thought was how many people will be picking up here at the farm. Looking at the spreadsheet it looks like we will typically have 30 or so members here during each pick-up period (assuming one person per member picks up). Each pick-up period is 2 hours long (4:00 to 6:00 T, Th and F and 9:30 to 11:30 am W). Doing the math, that comes to 4 minutes per person to pick-up their produce if we limit the number of people in the pick-up tent to 1 person. Seems a bit quick. No time to think through the week’s menu to make choices as to what to grab.
So how about two people at a time? This would give people 8 minutes to grab their goodies? Seems reasonable. And with the tent being 12 feet by 20 feet they should be able to socially distance. Could we get three people in the space and still socially distance by six feet? I think so. Now we are up to 12 minutes each. This give us time to ask questions like, “How are the kids?” and “What the hell is this vegetable?” But then I couldn’t be one of the tent dwellers for everyone to get their 12 minutes. How about four at a time?
With a well coordinated approach we should be able to get five plus me in the pick-up tent at one time. You will have to go in a clockwise rotation and all move at the same time (reminds me of the soup Nazi). I will remain standing near the middle of the south entrance area, unable to move when the tent is at full COVID-19 capacity. That gives each member 20 minutes to pick-up their produce. More than enough time to get your kids screaming from the car about how bored they are and asking when you are going to be done.
More likely we will just limit the number of people in the tent to two or three. There is more than enough room and we are all adults who can make reasonable judgements as to socially distancing. If things get out of hand and fights break out we can take it to another level. I don’t expect that to happen but with this year’s membership you never know.
As always, send in your questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, etc.