Hello friends,
Jeff and I wish you all warm greetings in the new year! We’re already getting excited about the coming season. Each season is a journey, different from the last. We like to think about it as an evolving work of art and wanted to fill you in on some of what we’ve been up to:
Budgeting. We’ve been hard at work the past month reviewing last year’s budget and setting one for the coming year. We’re going through all our farm programs and determining what we need to purchase to operate and what we would like to purchase in order to make our work more efficient.
Post Harvest. Last year we raised funds through our community funded loan project to update our post- harvest handling and storage facilities. We’re taking a weekly online course all about post-harvest to learn how we can redesign our post-harvest area and outfit it with tools appropriate to our scale.
Food Safety Training. We recently completed a day-long training to understand the Produce Rule of the Food Safety Modernization Act. This new legislation creates mandatory enforceable standards for sanitation and handling on farms that produce fresh vegetables and fruits with the goal of minimizing disease causing pathogens on foods that are typically consumed raw. In a way, it is surprising that something like this took so long to come into being. We were surprised to learn that our farm, while subject to the rule will not be required to have an inspection done because our sales are less than 250,000 and we sell directly to people who consume our food(rather than say a grocery store)—I can’t say I understand the logic there—but one less inspection is ok with me. Inspection or not we are still committed to ensuring that your food is completely safe to eat—we always have been.
Seeds and supplies. With our budget in order we’d like to begin placing orders for seeds and supplies. It might seem early, but we’ll be starting onions, leeks, shallots in the greenhouse in February! We thought it would be fun to include you in the seed selecting process so if you are signed up for the 2019 season by the end of the week we will send you 5 new varieties we are considering trialing for the CSA and let you pick 3. Still need to sign up?
Farm Workers. If you know of any good events, boards, websites or publications that you think would help us get the word out about our seasonal farm jobs and our worker share program please send us an email to let us know.
I could say much more. But we’ll leave it here for now. In the meantime, let us know if you need anything.
All the best,
Kelly
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