First announcements then part one of “Survey Says”.
The season is over! Do NOT pick-up your veggies this week at your usual place and time; they won’t be there. If you come out to the farm we will put you to work. I’m not trying to discourage you from coming out, just letting you know what to expect.
Early Bird Special continues until the end of the month. Sign-up today to lock in this year’s price for next year’s produce.
Don’t forget to tell your friends and family. We credit your account $25 for everyone you help recruit. Have them write your name on the “Where did you hear about us?” line on the order form.
Winter Squash for sale! This is the only thing we had in excess this year. If you’d like extra winter squash please contact me. We sell it for $1/lb (makes it easy to calculate the total). We have a reasonable variety though about half are butternut.
The Survey
Every year we try to do a survey of our members. We say our intention is to figure out how to improve the farm but in reality the purpose is to give me something to write about after the season ends. Just kidding. This is just a side benefit of the survey. The responses people provide really do help us determine what we grow next year. A good example is many years ago we did not grow kale. The main reason was that we heard way too many horror stories of members of other CSA farms being inundated with kale. Box after box filled with kale. So we thought we’d capitalize on this CSA cliché and advertise our farm as “The one without kale”. But we got an overwhelming request from one of our members for kale. So we added it to the mix. And what did we discover? It is really easy to grow and fills boxes really quickly; we could see why other farms grew kale. But more importantly we discovered that many of our members liked kale. But being Minnesotan they just chose to not be a bother and tell us they wished we grew kale. I suspect the person who asked for it was a transplant.
So every year we ask for your input on what went right and what went wrong. This year I joined the 21st century and used a web-based survey program to gather the information. I hoped this would improve response rates. Of course being a cheap farmer I used the free version that limited me to only 10 questions. I suspect many of you – especially those with little free time – are pleased with this limitation. I must say the results are outstanding.
In the past we were lucky to get 10 responses. This year we are pushing 15! Just kidding. Actually 80 people have so far started the survey. 68 people actually took the time to complete it. I’m not sure what happened to the other 12 people. I hope they are alright. But 68 responses so far is fantastic! I appreciate all your insight.
What have I learned so far? Well, first of all we have a very articulate membership. Some questions received more than 40 comments!
Second, that I need to use more granularity in the survey choices. The two textual responses to the question about “Overall experience” were: “Excellent (better than Pretty Good, not quite Phenominal [sic])” (I said our members are articulate, not necessarily good spellers) and “actually, better than pretty Good, more like, very, very good”. So note to self, next year add “Better than Pretty Good” and “Very, very good” as answers to the “How would you rate your overall experience?” question.
The third thing I learned is that nobody hated the experience. Let me rephrase that. Anybody who hated the experience has yet to fill out the survey.
The fourth thing I realized is I need to think through the phrasing of my questions. I asked “Can you give examples of what has been great or disappointing?” One answer was “The GARLIC”. I kinda wish I knew whether it was great or disappointing. But I guess that is what you’d expect being too cheap to upgrade to the “professional” version of the survey platform. Trying to squeeze two questions into one can lead to these types of misunderstandings.
What else did I learn from this survey? Even though we gave out more food this year than last year most people found the quantity of food to be “Just Right”, the most popular answer from last year’s survey. I guess it means our membership is getting good at figuring out what to do with whatever they get.
A few general trends:
Cucumbers, lettuce and kale were the top veggies people wanted more of. I’m surprised about the kale. I will make a note of it.
Eight people wanted more tomatoes! If you want more tomatoes I suggest you buy a larger share. FamilyShares were getting 7.5 lbs of tomatoes a week!
Only one person wanted more green onions, two people wanted more okra and three people wanted more fennel.
Cabbage lead the list of oversupplied veggies — but only at 28%. Next most oversupplied were fennel and eggplant. If we could only get the three people who wanted more fennel to take the fennel from all the people who said they had too much!
It looks like we can never have too much lettuce, snap peas, watermelon, shallots or herbs. These received no “too much” votes. But then again, this was a particularly bad year for lettuce, snap peas, watermelons and shallots. Herbs on the other hand did fine. I guess we need to make people take them until they say, “Enough already with the herbs!”
In general there were far more selections in the section asking for what you want more of than the section you want less of. I think this reflects in the positivity (is that a word?) of our membership.
That is probably enough analysis for this week’s newsletter. Next week I will delve into the comments people made, an area far more interesting I must say!
If you haven’t filled out the survey please do so. A link was sent to your email address on file. We appreciate your input and look forward to tweaking thing for next season. As always, feel free to send in comments, questions, etc.