Week 2, 2010
June Ninth
Our field of squash with mulch between the rows of plastic. — Momma Jane washing Royal Oakleaf Lettuce.
The Small Family CSA farm is truely a family farm. We are composed of Adam Varney (my fiancee), Jane Even (my mother), Julie Jacquinot, (my sister), Drew Coonon (my sister’s very serious boyfriend) and myself, Jillian Jacquinot. The five of us live on the farm and provide a good source of the labor that is needed to get the planting, weeding, harvesting, post-harvest handling and deliveries done. We do not have any hourly workers that come to work on a daily or even weekly basis. On occasion, in a pinch, we’ll hire some neighbors to come over and help bail us out. This year, and I’m very happy to say, we have 7 worker-share members who come out the farm and work a 3-hour shift every week to earn their CSA box (I love our worker share members so much!). Our family farm is small. We’re just the right size that we need to be for the farm to financially sustain itself.
Being a very small family farm and all, we don’t have a book keeper, a delivery truck driver, a greenhouse manager, a field-crew manager…or even a field crew for that matter. We are the all-mighty-5-of-us and that’s all the mighty we are. We are a very small farm. What’s beautiful about us is how deeply embedded our hearts are in what we are doing and how much we love each other in the process which makes us stronger as a whole. What’s challenging about what we are, is that we are only 5 of us….and we’re farmers. We do not have office workers or even office assistant workers. Each one of us are many things at once.
I, for example, being the primary full time farmer, am also the farm greenhouse manager, the book-keeper, the human resources manager, the tractor driver, the repair woman, and the person in charge of planting and harvest management. A larger farm might have one person, who is a full time employee, take on one of those roles. Adam, my fiancee, is in charge of the organic pest control (he’s very proud of this), cultivation (weeding and leading weeding parties), deciding what goes in the CSA boxes each week, post-harvest management and he has a full-time job off of the farm. Adam and I talk a lot about him quitting his job so that he can be a full-time farmer too once we’ve put a larger dent in the farm mortgage. We think about having children, and this may become more of a necessity once that happens.
This whole CSA thing is 20% good organic produce and 80% philosophy. What we’re working towards here with our photos from the farm, newsletters, direct marketing and as much personal contact as we can manage is a romantic involvement and passion towards an economically, ecologically and spiritually satisfying and sustainable food system. This whole thing is not just a box of food. You can get food at many places. But when you choose to buy it from a small family farm, you’re choosing to look at this food at a philosophical angle. You’re investing some of your time and energy into this because you believe there is something more rich, real and romantic about seeing your farmers faces, hearing their stories and seeing their farms. A box of food can be purchased at the store. What we are doing does not fit inside that box.
