FARMING IN A PANDEMIC

In many ways, it feels like we have been preparing for this from the beginning, right? Those early yearnings towards farming were built on a desire for self-sufficiency, for living simply and having everything we needed right outside our door. We have spent years trying, failing, trying again - learning skills and gathering knowledge to ready us for such a time as this.

We have acres of land to roam, bountiful food and gardens surrounding us, animals providing for us. We feel incredibly fortunate and blessed, rich in our health and stability.

And yet! Though our family is safe and not lacking in food, our farm business has been cut off at the knees. We chose 2020 (of course!) to be the year we ended our CSA, focusing solely on farmers market sales and restaurants. And while the market is still open, we are now operating with a “what will tomorrow bring”sort of anxiety. Every news cycle seems to have us rewriting our entire business plan, reevaluating our marketing strategy, pivoting and beginning again.

So, we return to the CSA model. We are so thankful for our loyal little community of customers and past farm members we were able to turn to, finding them ready and waiting for us.

We will still be at the market, beginning this weekend, for as long as the market can be open. There will be spinach, lettuce, arugula, and LOTS of Further’s chicken eggs! We will be encouraging pre-orders and online payments as much as possible.

We are staying open and flexible, knowing that everything might have to change again. And that is OK! We are going to make this work.

We are also wrestling a bit with a paradox, or conundrum, or difficulty of sorts: we are blessed to have plentiful resources in a time when resources are scarce (food!) and we want to share that with as many people as possible. Health is wealth and food is medicine, and we want everyone to have access to that. So how can we be generous and connect food with people who need it and can distribute it, while also remembering that our family needs to survive this financially as well?

So please come see us at the market (briefly, and from a distance)! Join our CSA and tell your neighbors about us. Help us connect our food with people who are hungry. Share your thoughts, your worries, your ideas with us. We are going to keep planting, going to continue expecting this to be our biggest growing season to date. Just like every year, we will bury our seeds in the soil in faith, in hope.

- Hannah.

A Choose-Your-Own CSA?

For many years, Hannah and I have relied heavily on the CSA model to get our season started. And we’ve received absolutely incredible support for it––support that has built our farm and made us many dear friends over the years. We would not still be here without it. 

But the CSA has always been limiting for the customer. Albeit with unrelenting enthusiasm and rarely a complaint, you who have supported us have still received your  produce exclusively at the mercy of the farm, the season, and our schedule. You’ve been amazingly supportive in the face of that, but we have come up with something a little different––something that supports our family farm while also offering those who believe in us a lot more flexibility. 

We’re calling it a market card, but it’s really a choose-your-own CSA in disguise.  

The idea here is that you buy the card upfront––which gets us growing in these leaner times (like we are honestly in right now) ––and in return we give you some extra veggie money ($5 for every $100 card or $10 for every $200 card). You can pick up at the Lexington Farmers market on Saturday or Sunday or at the farm (on select days). 

-Cardholders will get a text message every week with what we have. 

-Cardholders can reserve items at market so they don’t sell out (looking at you, strawberry and summer lettuce fans!) 

-Cardholders are not obliged to use any specific amount every week (though we will ask you to please let us know if you’re in the market for bulk items). 

Truth be told, without the classic CSA we’ve offered for the past 8 years, January has been very tight for us and we hope that you will see enough value in this idea to snag a card and help support your farmers!

It’s admittedly a bit experimental for us, but it’s an experiment in which we would love if you would join us! We’re limiting the number of cards for the season as we trial this new approach, so if you are interested please let us know or snag your card ASAP! You can purchase them online HERE in our store.

Thank you as always. 

Your farmily, 

Jesse + Hannah + Further + Ellis 

photos by Cassie Lopez

THE FARMER AND CHEF SERIES: WHAT FARMERS DO WRONG.

I'm walking beside Philip as we pass what I see as a thoroughly solid market table. It's not diverse, but it's stacked high with some of the better looking produce I've seen yet––healthy kale, turnips, radishes––all vibrant and fresh. Noticing that Philip hardly gives the table anything more than a passing glance, though, I ask him what he thinks about these farmers. He says they have some good stuff sometimes, but the price point is often too high, and they don't really try to work with him. And like that we're back in the truck and driving off to another market.If I can emphasize anything that I learned this day traveling around with Philip and Owen, it's the value of the actual relationship. The price points of our farm can be high, too. I know that. But they still come back to buy from us. Why? I didn't ask them this question directly, but I would assume it's because we will work with them, and because we get along well. So even when they don't want something we have, I almost always try to bring them something they do want so as not to waste their time––in fact, every farmer we spent any real time with that day, pulled something special for R.A.D. from underneath the table. But this isn't about what farmers do right––we'll get to that in later posts––this is about what farmers do to make someone like Philip and Owen lose interest.When I ask Owen to give me an example of what a farmer does wrong he sites one specific farmer who was often combative and would refuse to sell them things they wanted because she didn't want it to ruin her display. Notice the past tense in that sentence, because they stopped even trying. As a farmer, I get the empty table thing a little. I understand that you may not want someone coming first thing in the morning and taking all of your produce, leaving part or all of your table bare for the rest of the day, and you with nothing to do (most markets ask you stay until the end of the day before packing up). An empty table does not bring in customers. That being said, I know few farmers whose goal is to have anything less than an empty table at the end of the day. That's at least part of the point––to sell the food you bring. Also, with a good relationship to a chef, they may tell you what they are looking for in advance––"can you have twenty pounds of this for me next week?"––so you can plan for it and keep it off your table in the first place.Anyway, maybe this farmer, or the farmers I started this post with, just don't care to sell to restaurants. Because not all farmers do. Not all farmers see the value in it which begs the question, what is the value in selling to restaurants? At a busy market, you may have no reason to get rid of your produce early. You may have other regular customers who will pay full price for everything until you completely sell out week after week. So is it even worth building up that relationship? If they're paying a lower price, why should a farmer bother?For me, for starters, having worked in high level restaurants, I enjoy selling to them. I enjoy foraging or growing items I wouldn't normally bother with for a market table. I also like the idea of someone buying in bulk from us when I do not know what the market turnout will be––when I do not know what other farmers are bringing. They want forty pounds of tomatoes from the front table? Great. Because everyone else has them, too, and who knows if we'll be able to sell them otherwise. If we see or suspect we're the only ones who brought tomatoes that day, we might just ask full price for all of them, which means the chefs may not buy them. If I know I can get full price for something over the course of the day, I won't discount it and they understand that. They understand about the price because we have a good working relationship. So, finding the value in selling to chefs isn't much of a struggle for us.Though I know farmers who are successful at doing this, I don't want it to sound like an advertisement for selling only to chefs, thus neglecting the regular market customer. Not at all. In fact, we don't even remotely do that. We sell primarily to customers through a CSA, then we sell mostly specific, requested items to chefs like Philip and Owen (most of which we actually also do give in our CSA––daylillies for instance). Sure, they buy off our table, but mostly we bring them something they needed or wanted. Anyhow, I think it's important to consider the potential––the business potential––in building a relationship with chefs. Because the truth is you, along with the rest of the farmers, may have a bumper crop of amazing looking kale one week––more than you will ever sell in one fall market day––and the person who the chef is going to buy a pile from is the farmer who has made the effort to build a relationship. Even at a small discount––and they're not expecting free food here––it's a nice bit of security.How do you make this connection? Just stop them and talk to them. See what they need, sure, but more so, just tell them what you have. Shake their hands, tell them you see them at the market all the time and you'd love to work with them. Believe me, if you make the effort, they will take notice, and they will look at your table.There may be more posts on what farmers do wrong, but I say next week we do a post about what farmers do right, and what chefs do wrong. So stay tuned. Well, not literally. Go work, then check back next week. Oh, and feel free to add some commentary below––I'd love to hear what you think about the farmer/chef relationship.- Jesse.

THE FARMER AND CHEF SERIES: CHEF TO FARMER, NOT FARM TO TABLE.

In the name of full disclosure, Rolf and Daughters might be my favorite restaurant. I have worked and eaten at many great establishments over the years, but R.A.D.––as it so appropriately abbreviates––has served two of my most memorable meals. That being said, I suspected this may be the case long before I ever came in for dinner. The chef/owner, Philip Krajeck, has been coming to our farmers' market for several years now to buy produce. And for Philip, quality is paramount. He has bought loads of produce from us over those years but he has also turned down perfect-looking July carrots when the flavor wasn't there. He has passed on chanterelles when they seemed a little beyond their prime. I've always felt you can tell a good wine by simply talking to the winemaker, and I like to think you can tell a good restaurant by simply watching the chef at market. So I had no doubts, by this measure, that Rolf and Daughters would be good.But Rolf and Daughters isn't just a good restaurant, it's also an uniquely subtle one. The atmosphere is lively, italicized by fresh, creative food (and drink), that seems to prefer its focus be more on the experience than the chef––the experience than the farmer. No one at R.A.D. would likely describe the place as a farm-to-table, despite the fact that the chefs buy a vast majority of their food from local farmers. In fact, in the day I spent with them, they filled an entire pick-up truck full of food from no less than six different small farms. But this, as impressive as it is, is just not something they feel compelled to advertise. There are no blackboards with the farmers' names, no farmer portraits on the walls, nothing in their literature about farm-to-anything (in fact, nowhere in their online profiles does it even say who the chef is, let alone the farmers). They simply let the food advertise this for them.Curious about this, I asked Philip and his sous chef Owen Clark why Rolf and Daughters doesn't play up the farm-to-table thing, since they do it so legitimately. They both said they'd prefer to simply serve the best tasting food, and let the quality of that food reveal to people that it came from good farmers. "Doing it quietly," Philip added, "makes a bigger reverberation." And it has. Rolf and Daughters has already in their young existence been heaped with accolades including the number three Best New Restaurant from Bon Appétit in 2013. Moreover, you know it's reverberating because they are a mid- to high-end restaurant––in a city filled with mid- to high-end restaurants––that stays packed. In other words, when people want a nice meal, they may try other restaurants, but they go back to Rolf and Daughters. Again and again.Anyway, I felt it was important to profile Rolf and Daughters in this fashion to give you an idea of the type of chefs I was utilizing for this project. The ultimate goal is to understand how farmers can better serve chefs, and chefs can better serve farmers, so I needed a restaurant who greatly relied on these relationships to get to the bottom of it all. Next week, we'll dive a little further into those details––what farmers do right, what farmers do wrong, and we could all be doing better––so stay tuned.- Jesse.