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!