Good Questions

This summer I'm grateful to share the farm's work with an inspiring group of women apprenticing at the farm. In exchange for their enthusiasm and hard work, they're learning how we do things and taking notes (I hope) on how not to do things when one day they've their own farms. I suspect it's my history as a professor that propels my desire to provide a place on the farm for learning, but it's my less altruistic desire, too--to eat in the future--that moved me to create the opportunity for on-farm learning. You see, while there's much to celebrate about the "local turning," the movement toward and for more localized and good food, services and goods, we aren't living within a system yet that much supports such a turn. We're moving, as we always are, toward a more sustainable system. We'll not build one fully, not in my life, but we will get better and smarter and wiser, and it will occur as we are better with and to each other. About that I feel strongly, but we're not there; not yet.

But back to the Apprentices and the questions that they ask. Last week, one asked if I might articulate my fantasy for the local food system and for Morning Owl Farm's place in it. In another post, I will lay that out with gladness, but what matters here is that when I started the farm, I was told that the fifth year of business was crucial. If one is lucky enough to have a fifth year of business, it's a good thing. But the fifth year is also very hard, because you know you must grow or remain stagnant. In this, our fifth year, I decided to grow. The truth is, I had to. I could continue with a CSA I could sustain by myself that would feed maybe 25 families and drive me into the poor house, or I could increase the number of folks I fed by creating a different model to do so.

In five years as a farmer, I've learned a decent amount about living smaller and less expensively, but as you age, life is more costly. Your cars get older and need more repair, insurance companies assume as you yourself age, you too will require more frequent tune-ups and they charge dearly for the speculation. Taxes on property rises, mortgages spiral up as they do. Everything we buy is more costly and even as a farmer, I can't NOT buy. Feed costs for the ducks have doubled in a year, the power to run the pumps to water the crops have increased, too. Hell, even my waist size has increased . . . Nothing stays the same, small or cheap, that's for sure. Not all all. And so when Lori and I penciled out what percentage of our income I'd have to contribute from the farm for us both to feel good about our coupling and ourselves, we had one figure. Today, we have another and the truth is, I'd feel good about neither my contribution to our coffers nor to my own financial stability were I to continue to toil away to gross roughly $13,000 to feed 25 CSA families. And that's gross . . . not net.

So I made a move to stay alive as a farmer. I grew us.

What we decided to do was to seek investors, or CSA members, and have them help us do some start-up financing in the winter. This is basically how all CSAs work. But after amassing a few of them, investors with as little as a $50 investment and others with as high as $900 for the year, we opened our farm stand to the public. To do this, I had to begin to add products--produce and less perishable food stuff--to my offerings. Consequently, this year, rather than grow ALL of the food, I'm aiming to grown about 65-80% over the full season and offer it with some value-added products based on our farm's duck eggs, along with meats and other veggies, baked goods and other nice things from other producers in the Boise area and a titch beyond.

This new model raises the bar on uncertainty to some extent. For instance, the persistence of winter in southern Idaho in 2008, left me to purchase some veggies not just from other area growers, something I'm glad to do, but to even go out-of-state (gasp! to California) for some items. Doing that isn't desirable, but it's been feeding us and a lot of our members, and in the end, it's what's required if one is to eat as we await more harvest from our own soil.

Something we often fail to realize is that in our area, the number of producers can be counted almost on one's hands and toes. We are that small a community. The desire for what we grow seems limitless, but the supply is minute and we need desperately to bring more growers in. So, this year, while I start the season stocking the farm stand for the first few weeks with more out-of-state product than I'd like, alternatively, we're working to grow more farmers for the future through our Apprenticeship program, hopefully, more farmers who will stay put and grow food right here near Boise. I'm grateful for the opportunity to make a small contribution to that, and grateful to them for their excitement and optimism.

Let's grow!

Localvores, Organicos and Makin' a Livin'

There's an old adage that it takes a business about five years to make a profit. That old adage has been haunting me a lot of late because this is our farm's fifth year of business and profits don't seem yet within reach. I need a tractor, need to hire help, need an egg washer, need to pay for construction of the "clean room" that will be started this very day and that is estimated to set me back to the tune of a couple thousand dollars.

As I consider the start-up money taken in from our members this spring--around $13,000 this year--I think too about where that money's gone in five months. We bought veggie and flower seed, a few small trees, paid the power bill, bought 70 new ducklings, secured registration for workshops on legal liability, food handling safety (hence, the clean room construction), paid the monthly mortgage, kept the health insurance lights on, made sure the vehicle insurance is in good standing, made repairs on all sorts of winter-worn farm stuff, got myself some stylin' new Carhartt shorts, and stocked the farm stand with plants I grew and food I didn't because food's been growing slower than normal this winter-spring.

We had our "soft" opening just this past weekend at the farm stand, worked through a few kinks, met some real nice folks, and sold a good number of plants, greens, herbs, asparagus, jellies, Sconies, duck eggs and more. We had a lot of fun most of all, and as I counted the receipts, I was pleased to see we'd made enough to put together a new coop for our third flock, our research flock, the ones who will tell us how effective are ducks at increasing soil fertility, managing weeds and pests, and laying eggs under au natural conditions--no lights except what the sunshine brings. I'm excited about that project, but I already know one outcome of all that studying: selling 80 dozen duck eggs a week and trying to absorb feed costs that have doubled in the last year alone are more likely to break a farmer than make her. That said, I need to get this blog posted quickly because I have ducks to go feed and water in just a few minutes . . .

But before the morning's chores begin, it's important to note that like an awful lot of small acreage farmers, I spend a lot of time looking at bills, bottom lines, projected costs, obligations and where it might be possible to tuck in, scale down and draw the blinds to save a few dollars here and there. As we enter our fifth year as a farm and as a business, I have had to stew over some tough decisions, decisions I'm not fully comfortable with at all times, and will write about more in my next post.

All those worries aside, what makes me smile today is that my niece and her boyfriend are asleep downstairs, visiting for the first leg of a little post-semester vacation before Will begins a summer internship on an organic farm in Chelan, WA., and Erin starts summer work for Washington State University, where she'll learn more about orchards and integrated pest management, her major at university. Will grew up in the Washington orchards and has thoughts of taking some of the acreage of those trees into organic production. Erin is interested in bugs and the good work they can do for farmers. She wants to help farmers like me better understand the relationship we need to cultivate with those bugs to make us better at what we do.

It makes me happy to think of them and the qualities they embody and embrace: courage, thoughtfulness, hard-work, ethical eating and living, strength and generosity. I have already learned a lot from them both and look forward to all they can keep teaching me.
It thrills me that as I age, young people, my own niece, will keep on fighting the good fight, in a battle of her choosing with her own arms. But the thought that I need to make a living at this small acreage farm venture nags, knowing that this farm must thrive if this farm is to put to work all the good lessons Erin and Will have to teach us. And I think we can thrive, but not based on the business model that has sustained my soul, sustained the bellies of my community of eaters for four summers, improved and sustained our land, but not my wallet. This is the year, the fifth year, and this is the year in which we will make it or not, and don't think for a moment that thought isn't there looming most moments of most days these days.

But here's the deal right this moment, the ducks need to be let out now and need to eat and want to swim and drink.

And I need one more cup of coffee for the road ahead today.

More on money later, it's going to be 80 degrees today and seeds need planting and weeds need yanking.