First a few announcements then on to more survey analysis.
We are still taking orders for 2013 season. Get in now and lock in this year’s price for next year’s produce. If all your contact information and delivery information (share size, drop location, etc.) hasn’t changed you can simply send in a check with a $100 deposit. Otherwise use the order form.
We are also taking orders for Winter/Spring FruitShare. This is a great and tasty way to get your vitamin C this winter. I need your order by 12:00 noon on Monday November 12th.
I did not get sufficient interest in winter MeatShare or CheeseShare to make it work.
For all you Facebook users: I believe, though I am never sure with Facebook, that you can now add “Recommendations” to our farm Facebook page. If you go to our Wall (?) you should see a box labeled “Recommendations” or then again since it is Facebook you may not see it. But if you do you can add a recommendation. I think you can also write a “Review” on Google as well as LocalHarvest.org. Or you can simply ignore this and read on!
Speaking of Facebook, on average you only see 16% of the postings of pages you “Like”. Makes you wonder what you are missing. If you’d like to have greater success seeing postings from Fresh Earth Farms go to our Facebook page (or is it “wall” ?), hover your mouse over the “Liked” button until a menu pops up, then select “Show in Newsfeed”. This supposedly does something, but then again it is Facebook so maybe it doesn’t. Farming has gotten really difficult in this century…
Now on to the survey.
First, thank you all for filling out the survey. We are now up to 89 people starting the survey and 78 actually completing the survey. The survey was sent to 165 people so that is a pretty good response rate – ranks right up there with presidential elections! I surmise the 11 people who never completed the survey had a few hanging chads.
I broke up the comments into a few sections to better address them. With the large number of comments I anticipate my responses could fill up weeks of newsletters! How great is that?
I think I will start the discussion with what I call “Contradictory Comments”. These are comments from different people that contradict each other. It symbolizes the difficulty in satisfying everyone with a standard offering.
For the question asking for examples of what is good or disappointing this year I received these two responses:
– orange cherry tomato flavor!
– The ones that tasted less than great would be the cherry tomatoes (the yellow ones in particular)
I assume by the exclamation point that the comment about the orange cherry tomatoes was meant to be positive, but maybe not. In any case the second comment about the “yellow ones” shows one of the difficulties in selling produce. We did not grow any yellow cherry tomatoes. We grew red ones and orange ones. If you ate yellow ones you ate unripe cherry tomatoes, which would explain why they weren’t sweet. Cherry tomatoes ripen randomly so when we harvest them they may or may not be fully ripe. Harvesting them less than ripe gives them far more shelf life and they are less prone to cracking. But unripe cherry tomatoes will ripen on the counter. So I prefer we err on the side of less ripe and let our members ripen them. The problem of course is that our members don’t know that the ripe tomatoes are supposed to be orange. I suppose it would have been worse if our members were waiting for the orange ones to turn red…
A few responses to the question about variety:
sometimes it seems like too much variety.
I have been a member of another CSA where they had such a big variety that you didn’t know what half of the items were or how to eat them. This was a very good variety.
Include LESS of the unusual veggies that the average person does not eat.
As you can see this is a personal preference. We try to strike a balance between having exotic veggies (e.g. fennel or tomatillos) for the adventurous consumer and the standards (e.g. tomatoes, corn, beans) for the average consumer. We will always, unless Mother Nature prevents us, have a choice on the exotic vegetables if you pick-up at the farm. Unfortunately we can’t pack boxes uniquely to allow this for drop-site members; the effort is overwhelming. So we do the best we can to limit the number of times you find the exotic veggies in your box and try to fill them with veggies people are accustomed to. That way you can get a taste of something you may not have tried before yet not be overwhelmed with things you don’t like.
A related comment in the “Suggestions” section:
would it work in the couple share to get one or the other of something instead of everyone getting one of each thing. Sometimes I got such a small amount of eggplant or one leek that it was difficult to use without going to the store to get theirs to make a *cookable* size. Probably a lot of trouble,……
We try really hard to give you serving size portions. In the case of a CoupleShare we try to provide a serving for at least two people. Sometimes things don’t work as well as we’d like and we have to limit the amount each person receives, thus giving out less than serving sized portions. This happened with the leeks this year. The eggplants on the other hand were given out two per CoupleShare while they were producing. A quick glance through our notes shows we never put only one eggplant in a CoupleShare (not true with FamilyShares where we gave out eggplants over a longer period of time). We track what we put in the boxes each week so we can spread out items between the different shares sizes as well as on-farm pick-up thus enabling us to provide the drop-site boxes with serving sized portions. On-farm member have only themselves to blame if they pick-up less than what they need to cook.
Another related comment that deserves feedback for a number of reasons:
Our favorites were Brussels sprouts and, surprisingly, beets (they are excellent on the grill). There were a few times that I didn’t receive something that was mentioned on the Facebook posts. I realize that some items are split between drop locations on alternating weeks. I was disappointed that I didn’t get any rutabagas in the final box though. Sometimes, there is not enough of a particular item to feed an entire family or to use in a recipe.
Each week during the season we send out a newsletter on Tuesday, which is the start of our week (our week goes from Tuesday to Monday for reasons explained in another newsletter). On Tuesday we do the best we can to predict what is available that week. The list we put in the newsletter is everything that is available. That doesn’t mean it is available to everyone. And a CoupleShare box limits the number of things we can put in it — as I mentioned above, we try to have serving size portions. So the list that comes out on Tuesday does not indicate what will be in your share — just what is possibly in your share.
On Wednesday we make the final decision on what goes in the box as well as the choices for on-farm pick-up. Once the boxes are packed, we publish two pictures plus a description — one of a FamilyShare and one of a CoupleShare. These two pictures represent what will be in each of the shares for that particular week. I think without exception this year all boxes contained essentially the same thing. There were a couple times we swapped amounts between two weeks (and most likely nobody noticed until I just told you) but the boxes contained the same stuff from Wednesday to Monday. So if you really want to know what is coming your way check the pictures of the share boxes; they are posted on our web site as well as our Facebook page every Wednesday by 3:30 pm.
Also a CoupleShare may not be enough to feed a family. It is targeted toward two people sharing a meal.
Finally, we got very few rutabagas. I think every FamilyShare got one. And 14 people picking up at the farm got the other 14 (unless people took more than one). We will try to improve rutabaga production next season (more rain would certainly help).
Here are a couple more contradictions:
– Is there a way to exclude certain items for customers? For example, we never eat the tomatillos which go to waste if they are given to us. We don’t have friends or neighbors who use them either.
– I liked that someone else “picked” what I was going to be eating over a week… all I had to do was figure out how I was going to use it.
I wish we could figure out an efficient way to pack each box to each member’s preferences but I haven’t figured out how that would not put us out of business by increasing our costs significantly (Search “Webvan” for more details). At least we provide on-farm pick-up where people have choices…
This next section is what I am calling “Good ideas”:
I would love to see a couple of member events, potluck style.
I think that you all are already doing a terrific job! The season left me very happy in terms of vegetable quality and variety. Honestly, the thing I would love to see more are a few “on-farm” days, where all the members are invited to help out or just simply hang out. Pot lucks or corn roasts or just a farm tour day during the peak season would be just some of the awesome things that you could do. I joined the farm in hopes of really getting connected…and now I want more!
When we started the farm oh so many years ago our goal was to have one event each month during the season. Many of the people we spoke to who expressed interest in joining the farm said they wanted to participate in the farming process. We figured being close to the cities we could have some hopping events and get a lot of stuff done with the help of our members. How cool would that be?
The first event was a big hit. We planted a 1000 tomato plants in a few hours. I couldn’t wait for the next event!
Then summer came along and it got hot and humid and the kids were out of school and people were on vacation and grandma was in town and the business trip went through the weekend and the buddies asked to play golf etc. etc. etc. so by the second event we had only 3-4 people show up. There was one event that only one person showed. We quickly discovered farming during the hot, humid Minnesota summer wasn’t number one on most people’s list of fun activities. Sitting on the dock by the lake had an appeal dirty, dusty farming lacked. So we abandoned the idea of having summer events. We now have a spring event (usually potato planting or tomato planting) and a fall event (garlic planting and potluck). This year due to the weather the potato planting party did not happen. Hopefully it will be back next year. The garlic planting attracted around 20 people, which wasn’t bad. If people are truly interested in more events than a spring and fall event please let me know so that we can count on you being there. I have some ideas of how to make them more successful but all my ideas require effort, most of which during the season is focused on farming. Anyone want to be the farm’s Julie McCoy? And everyone is certainly welcome to come out and help anytime during the week. We had two people this summer!
One last “Good Idea: comment for this week’s newsletter, related to the above:
Create a Google Calendar for the members that have general estimates of when planting parties and other farm events might occur, so that members can plan a little bit better to participate. Obviously the weather dictates when specifically these events occur, but if you have a general idea of when they *should* then it would be nice to reference the calendar to keep those weekends free. Thanks for all you do. This was the first CSA we ever joined, and I’ve always been proud of our decision to go with Fresh Earth Farms. We brag about you, your newsletter, and of course our bountiful and wonderful produce. Pass on this thanks to your employees too, please.
First, thank you for all the kind words. We appreciate it and appreciate your spreading the word.
I think having an electronic calendar of some kind is a great idea. I’m not sure Google is the right answer (and I’m not sure it isn’t) but having a way for people to know when certain items are available (e.g. FruitShare, CheeseShare), as well as the dates of member events and I suppose even drop site days/pick-up times could be really helpful. Then again it might be overwhelming if we put all this on the calendar. If anyone has an opinion on this please contact me. As I mentioned previously, farming is getting really complicated in the 21st century!
I will respond to a bunch more comments next week. In the mean time be sure to get your orders in for Winter/Spring FruitShare and 2013 VeggieShares. The Early Bird order deadline has passed but I haven’t removed the order form yet so take advantage of my winter laziness and get your orders in!
As always feel free to send in comments, questions, suggestions, jokes, etc.