Greetings from Against the Grain and welcome to the twentieth week of the CSA! Just like past weeks, the customization period begins once this notification lands in your inbox (which should be around noon on Friday) and will end at 11:59pm on Sunday, October 11th. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to change pick up locations for the share that is currently open for customization, please email Harvie support to request that change. Always feel free to double check with Holly to make sure the change was made. It is so important to the farm that CSA members have flexibility in their pick up location.
We still have 2 or 3 spots in our four week extension to the regular CSA shares, with pick up locations at the farm and the High Country Food Hub only. Sign up through the Harvie platform. https://www.harvie.farm/signup/against-the-grain
Our reservations for Thanksgiving Turkeys are ongoing, but always sell out early! Our birds are raised to high welfare standards, with GMO-free verified feed, as well as continuous access to fresh pasture, water and sunshine. Reserve one with a $25 deposit on our website: atgfarm.com.
This week's newsletter contribution comes to you from M Mueller and is entitled "Planning for Next Year."
This week marks the final full-season CSA deliveries. This is a milestone on the farm: we are happy to bring another successful season to a close with the greatest gratitude for you, our members, whose loyalty and generous spirit has helped to provide food to a hundred households, to both the more fortunate and the less fortunate alike.
At this point in the season it is well to examine our practices and see how the farm is doing in relation to its people and the times. Demand for our CSA far outstripped our land capacity this year, as many more folks felt compelled to seek out better food resources for the health of their households. Also, the requests and applications of workers of all types to come to the farm has increased as more and more young people seek to find a place working in healthful community. As we watch the development of these trends, we go deep inside to see how we can best meet the needs for food-based health and community life. This is where we turn to the CSA model to see how it can adapt to meet these needs.
The first CSAs in the US were organized quite differently than the current model. In the beginning, in the mid 1980s, the CSA was a group of people who banded together to support a farm and its family through investing in the farm, putting it into a land trust, providing funding for the coming year and volunteering on the farm to help in the production and distribution of food. Our CSA falls into a different category, the food subscription plan based less on the historical CSAs and more on subscription buyers club models as developed by Booker T Whatley, the great African-American small farm visionary, in the 1960s. Each model has its particular advantages, and as we head into winter, a time of reflection and planning, we will be looking at how to maintain the resilience of Against the Grain Farm and its community.
One place we will be looking is into the hearts of our CSA members, you, our friends! We will wonder, does the community have any active interest in supporting ATG as a community farm, where planning, contributions and participation drive its working, or whether the current cash exchange model can be sustained as the farm family continues to grow and mature. How do we plan for the long term? Do we put our faith in the vagaries of an insecure and volatile money economy, or do we create a local economy, buffered from cold economic winds by the warm interest of our members? One thing is clear: the times are demanding that we adapt to new realities.
These are some of the exciting thoughts and ideas we will be exploring this winter as we prepare for the 2021 growing season. The trees are now turning red and gold and brown and appear like multitudinous banners accompanying Persephone, the ancient Greek goddess of the seasons, into her warm winter home beneath the earth. Likewise, we are ready to begin our huddle of planning for the coming season. We will keep you informed of any new developments, and hope you will keep us in your warm hearts and minds as we engage in our yearly hibernation of planning how best to produce food that feeds body and soul for as many as possible.
Much Love and Happy Eating,
Holly, Andy and the ATG Crew
