ON FROST AND SUCCESS.

We got our first frosts this weekend. And It felt.... good. Really good. Sometimes frosts can come at the absolute wrong time––too early, too late, too unpredicted––but we were expecting these and we were excited to see them.Frost sweetens the greens. Frost kills off unwanted weeds. Frost makes an excellent last name. But moreover, frost marks the end of the season, and a good time to celebrate. Or at least you always hope so.Of course, things are still growing, and will continue growing well into the winter. But mostly it will be the crops we want to be growing––carrots, beets, greens. Otherwise, the summer weeds are toast, the winter cover crops are rocking, and the main bulk is out and safely stowed away.So now we finish up our season with our wonderful shareholders, and start planning next year's garden, looking at seed catalogs, and getting ready for what we feel will be our best year yet––2016. We're excited about our CSA––very––excited about our markets, and excited to still be farming six years in. Not every young farmer lasts that long. Not every young farmer gets to experience frost elation. But every time we make it to that first fall frost, we feel a little victorious––one more year down, one more year in the books, one more year of experience completed. And although we will only know a year from now how we did, we do think next year will be a great year––more mushrooms, more honey, more vegetables, more fun. More pigs? Maybe that, too. All that said, we truly won't know until those first fall frosts of 2016 when we can look around and say, "By golly, we did it again!" So thank you, frost. It's always good to see you.- Jesse.

THE FARMER AND CHEF SERIES: WHAT FARMERS DO RIGHT.

It's around 8:30 a.m. and I'm looking at a large chunk of galangal, which has suddenly appeared from the cab of Rocky Glade Farm's truck for the chefs to taste. Owen––who is always bouncing a little with excitement, but particularly so at the sight of this rhizome––cuts a few slivers off and hands one to me. The galangal itself is beautiful, the flavor unreal, and the fact that it even exists in this moment? A perfect place to continue our TFAC Series. Because if you want to know what farmers do right, Philip and Owen tell me, just talk to Rocky Glade.So that's what we did. This past Sunday, Hannah and I went to Rocky Glade Farm to meet Jim, Julie and their distractingly wonderful children at their farm for a little conversation and farm tour.I should start by saying that what I didn't realize about Rocky Glade when I first requested an interview was that this is their busy time. Unlike us, who are now more or less "laid by" for the season, the Vaughn family is just gearing up. They do not do a full-on summer market––they literally and somewhat shockingly, don't even grow tomatoes. Instead, they focus most of their efforts on the fall and winter, because upon asking themselves, "When would our customers miss us the most?", wintertime was the obvious victor. So for them to have given us a whole Sunday afternoon in the fall was very generous, and I hope they found it as fun and interesting as we did.Something else I did not realize about Rocky Glade was what percentage of their sales that restaurants make up. Well, not restaurants, exactly, but primarily one restaurant––singular. In terms of income, they told us, Rolf and Daughters makes up around a third of their yearly sales. Then, of course, there are a few other restaurants that buy from them who they view perhaps as larger market customers. They also have their market table and then a Fall/Winter CSA to make up the rest. But Rolf is a notably significant slice of the pie. For a market farmer, that's an attractive reality––having a customer that large, and that consistent. However, when I asked them if they were looking for more restaurant sales like that, they both said not really. "We don't need another Rolf." They like having a couple other smaller restaurants, then a few different income outlets. Indeed, Rolf and Daughters supplies a large portion of their revenue, but because diversity is as important in your sales as in your garden, they do not rely solely on restaurants for their income. If the restaurant shuts down for a week, as they point out, the farm doesn't shut down. Since it is always producing, a farm needs alternatives and, we all laugh, "people who can use normal-sized chard and kale––some regular chefs."What their farm has with Rolf and Daughters is special, they tell us, but it isn't unique. "A lot of farms our size," Jim points out, "end up finding one restaurant they mesh with." This is a person who comes to them to sift through seed catalogs in the winter, or calls them regularly for produce, or even goes to them first when they're wondering if a specific crop can be grown locally. It's not just a customer, but a working relationship. Or as Julie put it, "A partnership."But if you were a chef, it would be hard not to not want Rocky Glade as your farm. They are passionate about what they do, and according to Philip and Owen, they're on it. They send consistent, regular emails with produce lists, and how much is available every week. Julie "scouts the garden hard twice a week", then sends them updates on what's coming in, and what's going out. She tells us she likes any type of communication that can "hang out there" for a while, so that the chefs can see it, and start thinking about it. Chefs have different schedules from farmers. When Rocky Glade is getting back from the fields, and typing up their availability lists, R.A.D is starting service. But by sending an email or leaving a message, the next time she checks in with them––which she does by lunch every Monday, if they do not respond––she will have an order within hours.Of course, Julie said she always feels like she's pushing too hard, but to hear R.A.D. talk about it, they're grateful for the check-ins––for someone working so hard to keep them supplied with great food. The chefs also like that they know how much they can order of something, the size it might be, and so on. Jim will even send chefs pictures from the field of various produce so they can see how it's coming along. It's smart, and as far as I can tell, greatly appreciated.So what the Vaughn family does so well, from my perspective, is focus on just a few restaurants––one in particular––and really works hard to satisfy those restaurants' needs. They don't just grow things and heap them on their table in hopes restaurants will buy every bit, because most of the time, they said, the restaurants want something different––something specific. They want a smaller size, shape, or even part of the plant. Getting to know the chefs then, eating at their restaurants and really building that relationship, gives them the opportunity to understand what those needs are and to fulfill them. Moreover, they communicate a lot. They ask a lot of questions. They give and request feedback. Rocky Glade, in this sense, is a great model for the restaurant farm because they are constantly striving to better serve their restaurants.Anyway, I could write a book on Rocky Glade, but later this week or early next I'll try and distill some more of what we learned there into a more concise, "Lesson from Rocky Glade" post. So check back and––sorry, can't help myself––go Cubs!- Jesse.

ALL THINGS ARE NATURAL.

My favorite kind of wine is natural wine. That's literally to how they're referred––Les Vins Naturels. These wines are typically unrefined, unfiltered, ornery, and I love them. They can taste sweet and bright, or like manure, but mostly they just taste alive. Anyway, I remember ten or so years ago when some of us in the wine trade first started referring to these wines as "Natural Wine" that many other wine professionals threw a fit, and the fit went like this: 1) Natural is too vague a term to use, and/or 2) Because wine is a product that is made by humans, it can therefore not be referred to as natural.Argument number 1 is fair. Natural is a vague term. But we weren't using it as an official label. We were just grouping a bunch of wines together and giving them a name in the same way we group stylish young individuals together and call them hipsters. And, perhaps like "hipster", the word "natural" wasn't always something producers wanted their wines to be called. It was unavoidable, though, that they would be grouped together somehow. These wines were all different, sure, but all had one unique feature in common––for hipsters, it was style, for natural wine, it was vivacity. We just wanted something to call all these wines that we so loved, and it could have been anything, but natural wine was what stuck. Argument number 2, however, that since humans produce and bottle wine it can therefore never be considered natural, has always grated on me.Why as humans do we cling so fast to the idea that we are even remotely capable of doing anything that is not natural? We intensively cultivate crops, milk animals and keep livestock, you might argue. Well, so do many types of ants. What about the fact that we make and drink wine? Not to be a spoilsport––pun intended?––but we've been doing that since we lived in trees. In fact, our relatives who still live in trees, still do it––they just don't bottle and sell the stuff (yet). How would I argue against that fact that we synthesize chemicals to kill unwanted plants? That has to be unnatural. Well, sorry, plants did it first. In fact, 99.9% of the pesticide and herbicide residue we ingest is actually made by the plants, according to THIS ridiculously interesting study. Moreover, many of the petrochemicals we do create can actually be completely dismantled by fungi––called mycoremediation––or bacteria. So, perhaps maddeningly, even the chemicals we create ourselves––which no one would really refer to as natural––are not so unnatural after all. Otherwise Nature wouldn't have an answer for them. Also, just for fun, did you know dolphins in the wild each have their own individual names with which they introduce themselves to other dolphins? Yep. So in short, we, too, are just animals. And we are doing nothing different from what Nature does, only most other parts of Nature are better at it; most other parts do it on a more sustainable scale.We just have to stop thinking that there is Nature, and then there's us––it's not healthy, and it's definitely not correct. We are a product of Nature. From the earth we came and to the earth we shall return, right? It is easy to look around at the manmade world we've created and think we did it on our own––easy, but wrong. We were domesticated by plants like wheat, soybeans, corn and the grapevine––which collectively possess the vast majority of our farmland, I might point out––in the same way that the squirrel was domesticated by the oak tree, or the hummingbird by the flower, or the hipster by The Strokes. In the end, perhaps it is symbiosis we are outside of, not nature. Nature we are very much a part of, even if we suck at it.- Jesse.

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.