February Newsletter

Greetings Friends!

Your farmers are rested and ready for another exciting season! The seeds are ordered and have arrived, and Kelly and I are getting ready to fire up the greenhouse – we typically start seeding crops like onions, peppers and tomatoes at the beginning of March. We’ve been enjoying the recent unseasonal weather prepping the hoop house; we’ll plant peas and potatoes in there soon, too.

Today – Friday the 24^th of February – is officially “CSA Day,” a national celebration of the kind of farming we do, established in recent years because that day is apparently the day most people sign up for their CSA. Signups for Three Sisters Farm have been progressing smoothly. The good news is we still have some space available for the coming season. If you’ve been holding off, now is a good time to reserve your spot! In recent years we’ve reached our membership goal in early April; signups tend to especially pick up after the Milwaukee Urban Ecology Center’s CSA Open House, a wonderful event bringing together many area CSA farmers. The Open House is on March 11^th from 11am-3pm. Even if you’ve already signed up for the season, come on down and meet your farmers! Kelly and I will both be there and would love to chat and answer any questions you might have.

Another exciting development connected to CSA Day is the unveiling of the Charter for CSAs in the USA and Canada. CSA is a unique farming model quite different from the models that bring food from farms to your local farmers market or grocery store. I have been known – past members will know! – to ramble on about these differences in farm newsletters from time to time. Now, though, someone has clearly and succinctly laid out these differences in a Charter which, it is hoped, will unify and strengthen the CSA movement. Kelly and I are happy to be early endorsers of this document; by doing so we make a public commitment to uphold the principles and practices delineated in the Charter.
Happy Spring!
Farmer Jeff

CSA Returning Member Signup 2017

CSA New Member Signup 2017

Each spring, Riverside Park's Urban Ecology Center is THE place to be to meet local farmers who grow food sustainably and learn how to buy directly from them. Over 1,000 people attend each year. Free workshops are offered through out the day. Jeff and I hope to see you there.

Workshop Schedule
11:30am & 1pm - CSA Basics

Jamie Ferschinger, Urban Ecology Center

12pm & 12:45pm - Cooking from your CSA Box
Annie Wegner Lefort, the Mindful Palate

Lunch available from Milwaukee Localicious

For more details about this year's Open House, visit Facebook event

February 24, 2017-
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms across the United States and Canada are setting roots more deeply in the land as they unite under a community-developed CSA Charter that provides a clear definition of what CSA is all about.
With 30 years of history and development, over 7,500 healthy, sustainable community farms have been established in the US, and many thousands more in Canada. These sustainable farms are directly networked with hundreds of thousands of households in the towns and cities where they are based and provide weekly shares of fresh, healthy, locally-grown food.
Together, regional networks and independent CSAs in the USA and Canada are banding together to launch an innovative and strengthening Charter for CSAs. The Charter will be inaugurated on CSA Sign-up Day, February 24, 2017.
CSAs that endorse the Charter are making a public commitment to uphold the principles and practices delineated in the Charter. It will provide a window of transparency for member households and for farmers, helping define and clarify what CSA farms are all about.
In the words of Elizabeth Henderson, CSA farmer and author of Sharing the Harvest, “CSA is a tremendously flexible concept for consumer-farmer connections. It’s an alternative system of distribution based on community values. The economics of direct sales make this a win-win solution for farmers and farm members. The farmer gets a decent price and the member pays less, since there is no middleman.”
“For the farmer,” she added, “CSA offers the possibility of a broad support group. Those groups are composed of local people who know about the farm, who genuinely care about it’s survival, and who are willing to share the farmer’s risks and rewards.
“In reciprocity, CSA farm members have the opportunity to eat fresh, healthy food, to connect with the earth, to know and trust in the people who grow their food, to deepen their understanding of seasonal eating, to support the local economy, and to take an empowered stance of accepting responsibility for one of our most basic needs.”

Check our the Charter